The Treasury Department said on Wednesday that it will automatically enroll children in the new Trump Accounts, the government-backed investment accounts that start babies born since 2025 with a $1,000 deposit.
Early sign-ups have had to seek the accounts out. Auto-enrollment will put them in the hands of parents who may never have heard of them, which makes the product’s design more than an aesthetic question. So far, one early adopter reports, it is almost aggressively plain.
Alex Nicoll, a Business Insider reporter who opened an account for his son, wrote in a first-person account published on Sunday that the sign-up he had put off for weeks took little effort, and that the money was invested automatically in State Street’s SPYM fund, an S&P 500 tracker with fees below those of the better-known SPY. Beyond adding contributions and checking performance, he wrote, “there was basically nothing to do.”
That restraint is a departure from the industry norm. Daniel Crosby, the chief behavioral officer at Orion Advisor Solutions, told Business Insider that gambling and trading apps share the same “reward structure: rapid feedback, variable outcomes, and a scoreboard you can check at any moment.” “The product changes from a same-game parlay to a call option on a meme stock, but the behavioral reward is remarkably similar,” he said.
Natasha Dow Schüll, an N.Y.U. professor whose book Addiction by Design studied slot-machine gamblers, has written that app makers borrowed the casino’s fixation on “scrolling, swiping, and clicking.” The Trump Account app, Mr. Nicoll wrote, offers almost none of that; everything it does can be seen in under five minutes.
The contrast is sharpest with Robinhood, one of the main partners behind the account. Warren E. Buffett has compared the platform to a casino. In 2024 Robinhood paid $7.5 million to settle a Massachusetts case over confetti animations and scratch-off stock rewards that regulators said pushed customers toward risky trades; the company denied wrongdoing. Last year it added prediction markets on sporting events, which it calls trading.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the accounts as a way to widen stock ownership. “Everybody deserves a piece of the action,” he said in July.
Mr. Nicoll found one flaw worth fixing: the wealth projections. His son’s $1,000 appeared destined to grow past $22,000, a figure that quietly assumed $50 a month in added contributions. The assumption can be changed, but a less practiced investor might never notice it, he wrote, and the contribution slider belongs at the top of the screen.
More investment options are coming, with guardrails attached. Funds will have to track a “qualified index,” and annual fees are capped at less than 0.1 percent. Much of the menu has yet to be decided.