Imagine this Brave New World that Donald Trump and Scott Bessent just laid the foundation for last week:
The year is 2041 and your daughter is now in her twenties; she’s had a federal financial account — a “Trump Account” — since she was a child that was created for her by a billionaire Treasury Secretary she’s never heard of, and it’s tied to her Social Security number. The account also has become a central clearing space for everything else she does, from student aid to healthcare to her tax refund, housing assistance, and the disaster relief she got after her home was hit by a flood.
One morning in October she tries to book an airline flight home for Thanksgiving, and her purchase is declined on the orders of the federal government. Her internet has slowed to a crawl, the apartment she was trying to rent just “vanished,” and the job she was interviewing for just stopped returning her calls.
What happened? Three weeks earlier, she’d gone to a protest and an undercover ICE operative snapped her picture. As a result, the “responsibility score” she didn’t even know she had that’s been made part of her Trump Account dropped by forty points, and when she calls to ask why, she’s told it’s “confidential government data” and there’s no appeal.
Every piece of that already exists in China. I described it in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America.
“China’s new ‘social credit system’ is a dystopian warning of what America needs to absolutely avoid as we head deeper into the 21st century, particularly after our brush with Trumpian authoritarian rule.”
That system, I wrote, is run “through government collaboration with a group of the largest social media, banking, and online commerce sites in the country,” and it scores individual citizens on everything “from how promptly they pay their taxes and bills, to ‘offensive’ speech in public or online,” right down to “jaywalking and playing loud music on the train.”
Your score determines your right to travel: China blocked 29 million air tickets and six million high-speed-rail tickets on that basis, and low scorers can find their internet slowed down, their kids kept out of the better schools, and their faces put up on a “wall of shame” in movie theaters. Even dating apps will shun them.
If you want to repair your score it can take years (typically 2-5 years in China) and requires publicly and effusively praising the administration and the Party on social media.
The Chinese government’s own summary of the idea is that “if trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.” Its official blueprint promises to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Americans of both parties have never, ever wanted this type of a system — we have a long history of explicitly preventing such a thing from being built here by our government — but it looks like Trump and Bessent are creating the foundation for it right in front of our eyes.
The key to creating such a system — once considered dystopian but now entirely consistent with Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — is creating a system where the federal government has a single master file on every citizen.
When FDR created Social Security in 1936, Republicans (and some Democrats) went nuts claiming that assigning everybody a Social Security number was the first step toward exactly this kind of a totalitarian outcome.
In response, from 1946 until 1972 every card carried the words “For Social Security Purposes, Not For Identification.”
Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson’s administration proposed a National Data Center in 1965 to consolidate the federal government’s computerized files all in one place, Congress held four sets of hearings on the suggestion and killed it. New Jersey Congressman Neil Gallagher warned that “the computer neither forgives nor forgets,” and the House committee concluded with this explicit warning:
“A suffocating sense of surveillance...is not an atmosphere in which freedom can long survive.”
Then came Watergate and America discovered that Richard Nixon had criminally tried to use the IRS against the people on his enemies list.
Members of Congress from both parties and in both houses responded by passing the Privacy Act of 1974, which the Justice Department explicitly says was written to curb “illegal surveillance and investigation of individuals by federal agencies” and to head off the government’s “increasing use of computers to store and retrieve personal data by means of a universal identifier, such as an individual’s social security number.”
Two years later Congress rewrote Section 6103 of the tax code, making it a crime for the IRS to hand your tax information to other agencies except under narrow rules.
In other words, for almost a century we’ve built silos into our federal government on purpose to protect our privacy and to make it harder for an oppressive federal government or rogue agency to destroy our privacy or our lives if we piss them off.
The IRS has your tax information, your state has your birth certificate, your school district has your report cards, and each is separated from the other by law. Intentionally.
The inefficiency is there on purpose because in the 1940s our politicians were anticipating what Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover eventually did, and in the 1970s they were responding to their now-revealed crimes against America and our Fourth Amendment.
Until now.
Last week Donald Trump and Scott Bessent went after those privacy walls with a chainsaw.
On Wednesday, Bessent’s Treasury Department published a new rule — effective the same day and with no public input or comment beforehand — that opens a “Trump Account” for every American child under 18. If they don’t already have a Social Security number — which Bessent’s order uses as the primary identifier — they’ll simply assign one.
Bessent says it’ll create more than 60 million accounts, that it’ll affect 73 million children in 44 million families, and that when it’s done by next year “nearly 100% of eligible children will have Trump accounts.”
Nobody asked their parents, who can’t even opt out. The rule says “the Secretary is the responsible party for an auto [automatically created] account,” which removes you and your child herself from control over the account, and makes Bessent or his delegate the person legally authorized to act for your child.
Treasury notes that “no separate action by anyone is required for the auto account to be established.” Until a parent claims it, the only money that can go in is money routed through the Secretary from donors he approves “in the Secretary’s sole discretion,” and those “donors” can now give corporate stock that stays locked in the kids’ accounts for up to five years.
There’s no way to say no. When the Senate Finance Committee released its version of this program in June of 2025, CNBC reported that “parents may also opt out.”
That language was gone by the time Trump signed the bill, killed by Republicans in the Senate although nobody knows who did it, who told them to, or why (but I suspect it was Ted Cruz, who apparently views these as the first necessary step toward privatizing Social Security).
A BabyCenter survey this summer found 26 percent of parents are already purposely declining the Trump Accounts, and Treasury’s own numbers show only 5.6 million of 73 million eligible kids had been signed up by late July.
So Treasury simply going to enroll the rest anyway. It’s only now asking for public comment on whether anyone should be allowed to refuse, and under the idea it’s floating a parent still couldn’t say no.
Behind each of these accounts sits a master file that could become the basis of a new Republican “social trust score.”
Treasury’s brand-new Trump Accounts Program System of Records can hold a child’s name, Social Security number, birth date, and home address, along with parents’ phone numbers, emails, signatures, and bank account numbers.
It’s searchable by Social Security number and housed at Treasury and at the $55 trillion Bank of New York Mellon in Manhattan, whose largest shareholder is the $15 trillion Blackrock.
And they’re already going way beyond these just being cute little savings accounts for kids and turning them into data repositories like the Chinese use.
Information can come in from “other government agencies such as federal, state, or local entities” including ICE and go out to any federal, state, or local agency when a record “indicates a violation or potential violation of law that is criminal, civil, or regulatory in nature.”
Jaywalked? Played loud music on a train? Attended a protest against ICE or the GOP?
You can ask to see your or your child’s record but there’s no procedure to delete one, and for now, the notice says, “the records will be treated as permanent.”
The man who signed the rule, Frank Bisignano, runs both the IRS and the Social Security Administration, which were both explicitly created by Congress to run as silos instead of being integrated.
Treasury has also decided that the existence of your own child’s account is “confidential tax information.” To learn anything about it you have to “authenticate” yourself and “establish” your “legal authority,” and the department expects 63,360,000 people to go through that.
When I was about twelve my dad gave me Kafka’s The Trial, which gave me nightmares, and told me that this book would help me understand how people lived behind the Iron Curtain and why in America even Republicans like him and Barry Goldwater insisted on transparency in government and restrictions on governmental power. He’s gotta be rolling over in his grave, along with Barry.
Treasury claims they’ll keep all this information safe. But Bessent has already done an end-run around our legal privacy protections when he personally signed a 2025 agreement to feed other taxpayer data to ICE.
Four weeks ago the D.C. Circuit ruled that was a crime Bessent committed, upholding a judge who found the IRS broke that very law “approximately 42,695 times.” The administration is apparently continuing the practice, and says they’ll take this ruling to their six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.
Don’t get me wrong here: giving every kid a nest egg is a great idea, one first proposed (along with what became Social Security) by my hero Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice. Because our capitalist system lets the rich easily get richer and keep the working poor in poverty, he wrote Congress should step up:
“To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling [a year’s salary at that time|, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.”
But even Paine, with his confidence that our government could do great things and insert itself into the rules of capitalism to create and maintain a middle class, wouldn’t have wanted any single president to have a file — also held by one of the nation’s largest for-profit corporations — that could give the president control over the lives of every single American.
The comment period on the companion rule to this plan runs through November 30, and you can file a comment today demanding — at the very least — a parental opt-out, a right to have your child’s records deleted, and the name of every agency and contractor that touches this data.
After their decades of caterwauling about “big government” and Obama’s “FEMA Camps,” you’d think more Republicans and conservative media would be all over this, and maybe this article will help light some fires.
So call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and ask who removed the opt-out, and what happened to the privacy-protection walls between agencies that their predecessors built.
And share this with every parent you know, and if you can, subscribe to and support the Hartmann Report so I can keep sounding this alarm (and others).
Louise’s Daily Song: “Child of the Police State”
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Saturday Report 10/3/26 - Corporations Aren’t Pricing Products Anymore. They’re Pricing You
Surveillance pricing makes me furious.
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Trump’s first term first meeting with the joint chiefs. He asked why we could not use the nuclear weapons we have? He asked this three times. The generals and admirals were dumbfounded.
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”Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich”.
Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.
So now we know why they need to built all those AI data centers!
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