Peter Schiff warns 1.7 million babies getting $1,000 Trump accounts will repay the $14.6 billion cost themselves

Godwin Oluponmile

Thu, July 30, 2026 at 2:00 AM PDT 7 min read

About 1.7 million American babies now qualify for $1,000 apiece from the federal government, but Peter Schiff insists they'll end up paying it back themselves — with interest.

"There is nothing to celebrate," the economist wrote on X on July 6, the first trading day for the new Trump accounts.

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President Donald Trump had opened that session from the Oval Office hours earlier, remotely ringing the bell for the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange in a ceremony with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Schiff, chief economist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, has spent years warning that Washington borrows too much, so his complaint here is a familiar one. The government doesn't have a spare $1,000 sitting around for every eligible newborn, he argues — it raises the money by issuing more debt, which means the same babies collecting the deposit today grow up into the taxpayers covering the interest on it tomorrow. He'd rather Congress cut spending instead.

Those babies are part of Generation Beta, the cohort demographers date from 2025 through 2039. The U.S. Treasury Department told Moneywise that sign-ups have now reached 7 million, after running at roughly 1 million a month across the six months before launch — 1.7 million of those children are eligible for the federal seed deposit. About $1.5 billion has gone into the accounts since July 4, a figure covering both the government's money and what families have added on top.

What the $1,000 costs, according to Congress's scorekeeper

If you have a baby at home, here's how the deal works.

Any U.S. citizen child born from January 2025 through December 2028 who has a Social Security number can claim a one-time $1,000 federal deposit, and a parent or guardian starts the process by filing IRS Form 4547 or using the trumpaccounts.gov portal.

After that, you, your relatives and your employer can put in up to $5,000 a year combined until your child turns 18, though the employer's share tops out at $2,500.

The Joint Committee on Taxation priced all of this before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became law. Its July 1, 2025 estimate lists a line called "Trump accounts and contribution pilot program" at $15.2 billion for fiscal 2025 through 2034, and a footnote in the same table breaks out $14.6 billion of that as the deposits going out the door. The tax breaks account for almost none of it, and after 2028 the deposits stop entirely.