Trump Accounts: Wall Street Gets the Keys to Your Child's Future

Will these “Trump Accounts” become a stepping-stone to Universal Basic Income?

Meet the Financial Gatekeepers

Trump Accounts appear simple on the surface: a child receives a government-seeded investment account, the money goes into approved low-cost ETFs, and the account grows over time. But the real issue is not only what the child receives. The real issue is who designs the system, who administers it, who holds the assets, who earns fees from the assets, who controls the platform, and who has authority to change the rules later.

The first party is the U.S. Treasury. Treasury is the federal authority overseeing the Trump Accounts program. It sets the program framework, approves the investment options, and selects the private firms that will run the infrastructure. The Treasury announced that BNY would serve as the financial agent for Trump Accounts and that BNY would partner with Robinhood, which would serve as the brokerage and initial trustee. That means the program is public in purpose, but private in operation. The government establishes the account structure, provides the initial seed capital, and sets the rules, while private financial firms handle custody, brokerage access, administration, and investment products.

Vladimir Tenev, CEO and Co-Founder of RobinHood. Both of his parents worked for the World Bank. Just a coincidence I’m sure.

BNY, formerly known as Bank of New York Mellon, is not a neighborhood bank. It’s one of the most important custody and asset-servicing institutions in the financial system. BNY says it oversees $59.4 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $2.1 trillion in assets under management. It also says it touches about 20% of the world’s investable assets. That’s the role of a custody giant: it doesn’t simply make loans like a typical commercial bank. It safeguards securities, records ownership, processes transactions, services funds, handles settlement activity, and sits in the plumbing of modern finance.

Through the lineage of Bank of New York, which was founded in 1784 by a group that included Alexander Hamilton, BNY is regarded as one of the three oldest banks in the United States and among the oldest in the world.

For Trump Accounts, BNY’s role is powerful because custody and administration are the back-end machinery. A custodian is not necessarily choosing every stock, but it’s part of the system that records, safeguards, processes, and supports the assets. BNY also benefits from scale. In its 2025 annual report, BNY reported record revenue of $20.1 billion and record net income of $5.3 billion. Its chairman and CEO is Robin Vince.

Robinhood is the public-facing layer. Treasury said BNY had partnered with Robinhood, and Robinhood would serve as the brokerage and initial trustee for the Trump Accounts. That means families are not only entering a government-created savings structure; they are being brought through a financial technology platform best known for retail trading, app-based brokerage, crypto trading, options trading, and subscription services. Robinhood reported $4.5 billion in 2025 revenue, record net deposits of $68 billion, and 4.2 million Robinhood Gold subscribers.

Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt (born 1984 or 1985) is an Indian American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the founder of Cowboy Space Corporation and the co-founder and former co-chief executive officer of Robinhood, a U.S.-based financial services company. Bhatt is the son of Gujarati immigrants from India and grew up in Poquoson, Virginia. His father worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Robinhood’s business model is not charity. Like every brokerage platform, it survives by turning accounts, deposits, transactions, subscriptions, cash balances, and user activity into revenue streams. In one quarter of 2025, Robinhood reported transaction-based revenue from crypto, options, and equities. It also has subscription revenue through Robinhood Gold. So when a government program places millions of families into a Robinhood-accessed account system, Robinhood gains more than a patriotic branding opportunity. It gains users, account relationships, and a long-term position inside the financial lives of children and families.

The investment side is handled by the major fund managers. Treasury’s approved ETF lineup includes State Street’s SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF, ticker SPYM, as the default option. Other approved funds include BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, IVV; BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF, ITOT; Vanguard’s Total Stock Market ETF, VTI; and State Street’s SPDR Portfolio S&P 1500 Composite Stock Market ETF, SPTM. In other words, the money flows into index funds managed by State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard.

State Street is both a custody bank and an asset manager. Its asset-management arm, State Street Investment Management, runs the SPDR ETF family. State Street’s 2025 reporting says its assets under management included SPDR-related assets, and Reuters has reported that State Street’s investment management division reached roughly $5.4 trillion in assets under management in 2025 amid ETF growth. State Street is also one of the major index-fund voting powers in corporate America.

BlackRock is the largest asset manager in this group and runs the iShares ETF franchise. Its iShares funds are among the dominant ETF products in the American market. In the Trump Accounts lineup, BlackRock appears through IVV and ITOT. IVV tracks the S&P 500. ITOT tracks the broader U.S. stock market. BlackRock earns money through investment advisory fees charged to the funds. These fees are small as a percentage, but when assets reach billions or trillions, tiny percentages become enormous revenue streams.

Vanguard is structurally different from BlackRock and State Street (because the Rothschilds are the largest investors). Vanguard is not publicly traded in the same way BlackRock and State Street are. Vanguard describes its structure as fund-owned: Vanguard is owned by its funds, and the funds are owned by their shareholder clients. This is why Vanguard has historically promoted low-cost investing. Vanguard says its average asset-weighted expense ratio fell to 0.06% in 2025, far below the industry average. But even with Vanguard’s lower-cost structure, the broader question remains: Trump Accounts still direct children into institutional index products, not into individually controlled cash savings.

ETFs generate revenue mainly through expense ratios. An expense ratio is the annual fee charged by a fund as a percentage of assets. SPYM reportedly charges about 0.02%, while the other approved funds are reported to charge around 0.03%. Those numbers sound tiny. But this is where scale changes the story. If $1 billion sits in a fund with a 0.03% expense ratio, that is about $300,000 per year in gross fund expenses. If $100 billion sits in similar funds, that becomes about $30 million per year. The fee percentage is small, but the pipeline can become permanent.

There are other indirect benefits too. More ETF assets increase assets under management, strengthen market share, improve fund scale, and deepen the fund manager’s role in corporate governance. Index funds do not merely sit silently in the background. They own shares; and those shares carry voting rights. The fund manager typically votes proxies on behalf of the fund in accordance with its policies, unless pass-through voting applies. Vanguard’s own 2025 stewardship report says its funds voted on 35,871 matters and engaged with 642 U.S. companies. That gives you the scale of influence involved.

This is where the ownership question becomes more complicated. The child may own the account economically. The ETF owns shares of companies. The fund manager manages the ETF. The custodian and brokerage administer access and records. Treasury sets program rules. So “who controls the money?” depends on what level you are looking at. The family may control certain account choices within the program. Treasury controls the program design. BNY controls major administrative and custody functions. Robinhood controls the customer-facing brokerage infrastructure. State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard manage the investment funds. Corporate voting power is exercised through fund governance structures. That’s not simple private ownership in the old-fashioned sense.

The government relationship with these firms is not limited to Trump Accounts. During the 2020 market crisis, the Federal Reserve created facilities to buy corporate bonds and bond ETFs, backed by Treasury equity investment. The New York Fed published vendor information related to those emergency facilities, and BlackRock was hired in connection with certain Fed market-support operations. This doesn’t necessarily mean BlackRock controls the government outright. However, it does show that during crises, the government turns to the largest financial firms to implement emergency programs. And once again, the “ruling class” are the ones who benefit.

The danger isn’t necessarily that someone can immediately empty the account. The danger is structural dependence. Once families accept that government should create, fund, regulate, and steer childhood investment accounts, the door opens to future rule changes. Contribution limits, tax rules, withdrawal rules, approved investments, and reporting requirements can change. Identity requirements can expand. Access conditions can be added, and penalties can be imposed. A program that begins as a $1,000 gift can become a permanent behavioral and financial framework.

Another danger is the normalization of government-directed investing. Instead of parents simply saving money for children independently, the state becomes the gateway. The state selects the structure, the approved firms, the default investments, the eligibility, and determines tax treatment. That creates a financial relationship between the child and Washington from birth. Even when the investment products are ordinary index funds, the account itself exists because of federal design.

The final danger is concentration. Treasury, BNY, Robinhood, State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard each play a different role, but together they form a channel. Public money enters, families are onboarded, brokerage infrastructure captures the user relationship. Custody infrastructure handles the assets, and ETF managers receive inflows. Corporate voting power grows through indexed ownership. The child receives exposure to the stock market, but the system receives something too: scale, data, fees, account relationships, and long-term dependency.

So the clean breakdown is this: Treasury oversees and writes the rules. BNY administers and supports custody infrastructure. Robinhood provides brokerage access and the customer-facing platform. State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard manage the ETFs. The child owns the account economically, but the machinery around that account is controlled by government policy and major financial institutions.

Could This Lead To Universal Basic Income?

This scenario outlines how we might experience a gradual shift toward greater state control.

It could begin with a narrowly targeted program. Instead of giving every citizen money, the government creates investment accounts for newborns or children. The program is marketed as encouraging long-term saving and wealth building rather than providing welfare.

Once the infrastructure is in place, Congress could decide to expand eligibility. Instead of only newborns, it might include all minors. Later, it could be opened to every citizen with an income below a certain threshold, and eventually to all adults. This kind of incremental expansion has happened with some government programs over time.

The next step would be creating a universal government-linked financial account. Once millions of people already have accounts administered through an established system, policymakers might find it simpler to distribute other benefits through the same infrastructure—tax credits, disaster relief, stimulus payments, education grants, or retirement supplements.

From there, a future Congress could choose to make recurring deposits rather than one-time contributions. Instead of a $1,000 seed deposit at birth, the law could authorize annual, monthly, or income-based deposits. At that point, the same infrastructure could function as a delivery mechanism for something resembling UBI.

Critics who raise this possibility often focus less on the payments themselves and more on institutional dependence. Their concern is that if government becomes the primary gateway through which people receive investment accounts, tax benefits, and recurring payments, financial relationships between citizens and the state become more centralized. They argue that future lawmakers could attach new eligibility rules, reporting requirements, or conditions to participation.

Others point to the broader trend toward digital financial infrastructure. In this situation, if government-sponsored investment accounts, digital tax administration, electronic benefit payments, and faster payment systems are interconnected, distributing recurring payments would be administratively easier than in the past.

Infrastructure and policy are entirely different things. Building a money-distribution system does not dictate how it will be used. Governments routinely build infrastructure that later fuels entirely new programs.

So, as a hypothetical, expanding government could outline the progression like this:

1. Government creates investment accounts for children.

2. The financial infrastructure becomes established nationwide.

3. Eligibility expands over time.

4. The same accounts are used for additional government payments.

5. Recurring deposits are authorized by future legislation.

6. The program evolves into something resembling a universal income system.

Conclusion

If a government-seeded investment account system were gradually expanded over time, it could become the financial infrastructure for a form of Universal Basic Income. Once a centralized framework exists to create accounts, verify identities, distribute funds, and regulate investment options, future Congresses could choose to broaden eligibility, increase contributions, or repurpose the system for recurring government payments.

The concern from critics is not that this outcome is inevitable, but that the underlying infrastructure makes such an evolution administratively easier. In a constitutional democratic republic, increasing reliance on government-administered financial accounts could shift citizens from independent economic actors toward greater dependence on state-managed systems, potentially expanding the government's influence over financial behavior through changing eligibility rules, reporting requirements, contribution limits, or other statutory conditions.

If a system resembling Universal Basic Income were ever implemented through centralized, government-administered financial accounts, I believe it could lay important groundwork for the type of economic control described in Revelation 13. In that view, widespread dependence on a centralized financial system could make mechanisms such as social credit scoring or restrictions on buying and selling easier to implement.

Keep your head on a swivel, and Christ in your heart.