The Trump Accounts vs. Inflation

Are the new Trump accounts fatally flawed?

David DeMay | July 17, 2026

Twenty years ago, George W. Bush spent the political capital of his second term on an idea he believed could reshape American retirement security: letting workers divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal investment accounts they would own and control. It was ambitious, it was contested, and by the end of 2005 it was dead -- sunk by opposition that crossed party lines and a public not yet ready to trade a guaranteed government check for market risk. The great hope of that administration withered on the vine, and personal-account reform has never fully returned to the table since.

Two decades later, a different administration has succeeded where Bush's did not -- not by touching Social Security, but by building something adjacent to it. The "Trump Account" program, created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and launched this month, seeds a $1,000 federal deposit into a tax-advantaged investment account for every eligible child born between 2025 and 2028. It's a genuinely novel piece of policy: a nudge toward an ownership society, delivered at birth, compounding quietly for eighteen years before a young adult ever touches it.

But there's a structural flaw sitting inside this otherwise promising design, and it's worth naming before the accounts have another decade to compound around it: Trump Accounts have no inflation-hedging option at........

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