By admin 
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday encouraged California residents to open federal savings accounts under a recent Trump administration program that offers $1,000 to babies born between 2025 and 2029.
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In July, the White House started a program allowing parents to create 530a accounts, which function like individual retirement accounts, and claim $1,000 for infants born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028. Some 7 million children have since been registered for the Trump Accounts program, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month.
“I’m enthusiastic about encouraging people to get a Trump account. I think it’s incredibly important,” Newsom told reporters at a Friday press conference, where he said 1 million California kids had claimed accounts under a similar state program that began in 2022.
Newsom called Trump Accounts “one of the best things” President Donald Trump, who he frequently criticizes, has done.
He also praised Sens. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for introducing bills to create nest eggs for American babies, and Micron, the semiconductor company, for investing $250 million in the federal program.
Newsom praised Trump Accounts as “direct,” “tangible” and “results-oriented,” saying it would make a “direct difference in the next generation.”
“You’re giving them hope, and so we’re here to encourage people to take advantage of this, to not fall prey to the politics or the cynicism, or maybe even the fear that if I download a Trump Account somehow, that means something,” he said.
“It doesn’t. It just means something for your kid. It’s not Trump’s money. It’s your child’s money, and so we want to encourage everybody out there to take advantage of this program.”
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1 million CalKIDS accounts
The recent launch of the Trump Accounts, Newsom said, has elevated the consciousness around a similar California program that launched four years ago but has so far been unable to reach many of those it aims to benefit.
In 2022, the Newsom administration launched the California Kids Investment and Development Savings Program (CalKIDS), a statewide initiative that provides eligible public school students with scholarships of up to $1,500 to pay for higher education.
The automatically created scholarship savings accounts can be used to cover expenses such as tuition and fees, books and supplies, and computer equipment. At the time, the program was hailed as the nation’s largest children’s development account program for higher education with more than five million children automatically enrolled.
At the press conference Friday, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom announced that one million children in California had claimed their CalKIDS accounts — an important milestone given the state’s “struggle” in publicizing the program and getting families to sign up. While the accounts are automatically created, only those who claim theirs can access the funds.
According to a dashboard that exclusively tracks high school participation in the program, more than 1.1 million CalKIDS accounts are available for eligible students currently in grades 9-12. Of them, less than 25% have so far been claimed. In Sacramento County, about 28% of eligible high schoolers have claimed their accounts.
With the goal of increasing access to early wealth-building opportunities like Trump Accounts and CalKIDS accounts at the local, state and federal level, California will soon launch a new tool that will allow families to see and claim all the investment accounts available for their children in one place.
Expected to pilot in California in a few weeks, the mobile-first bilingual Early Investment Accounts Navigator plans to expand to other states by the end of the year.
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