“Treasury confirms plan to auto-enroll millions of children in Trump accounts”, 29 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
I'm in the wrong building. I'll say that before you say it. I came down here about the dog — she's due for her license, and the woman on the phone gave me a number, and the number gave me a department, and the department gave me this hallway. You've got your coat on your arm. I won't keep you. It's just that while I'm standing here there's a thing I've been carrying around since Tuesday, and you look like somebody who reads the paper.
I wrote it down. Hold on, it's in here. No — that's the fan belt, the garage wrote the price on the back of an envelope and I can't read their sevens. Here. The Hill, Tuesday the twenty-ninth: Treasury released new rules, and the report says the auto-enrollment eliminates the need for parents to sign up. Those are the reporter's words for it, and I copied them out exactly, because I don't believe a sentence like that has ever been said to me about anything.…
…(cont) More than sixty million additional children under eighteen. That's the figure the report puts on the department's own guidance. Accounts, for sixty million children, and the thing taken off the parents' hands was the signing up.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this. It's the date I can't get past. Georgetown, the Center for Children and Families: nearly two and a half million children have lost Medicaid or CHIP coverage since January of 2025. Five states down ten percent or more. Indiana down more than twenty-three.
So I've got two numbers in the same coat pocket. Sixty million children who get an account without a parent doing a thing, and two and a half million children whose coverage came off. Is there a line in either page about that second group getting anything switched back on automatically? There isn't in my copy. I looked twice, the second time with my glasses.
Forgive me, here I am on it again — but this next part I actually understand, so let me show you. My insurance found me at the new address before the mail did. The renewal went through on its own and I never touched a pen. Then the fan belt: sixty-four dollars, twelve of it back by rebate, and for the twelve I needed the receipt, the form, and the barcode cut off the box, and the box is still in the glovebox because I couldn't find the scissors. And out at the toll plaza the machine bills me at 6:04 in the morning without asking my name. So the automatic exists. It found me at the new address and it finds me at 6:04. It hasn't found me that twelve dollars yet.
Which brings me back, and I do apologize, to the physical part of it. This morning I carried the dog's folder across the room to window four — the rabies paper, the old tag, her name spelled wrong on the county's copy. A woman ahead of me was carrying a folder too, and hers was thicker than mine, and she went back to the bench with it twice. Does either page in here say what a parent has to carry across a room to keep a child's coverage card working? Mine doesn't say. Mine says what they don't have to carry for the account.
Oh — excuse me, before the elevator. One thing and I'll let you go.
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“They found a way to reach sixty million kids in one week without a single form, so the machinery works beautifully when the errand is a brokerage account with the boss's name on it. Georgetown counted nearly two and a half million kids off Medicaid and CHIP since January of last year, Indiana down more than twenty-three percent, and the automatic showed up for the accounts, not for the coverage. A kid with an account they can't touch and a card that stopped working is a kid holding the bill for their own checkup.”
“This is the largest expansion of children's savings in the country's history, and frankly Medicaid is a different program — different agency, different paperwork, why are you putting them in the same sentence? Did I say different paperwork? That doesn't sound like me. Look, the accounts are automatic because the Treasury Department is efficient, and the coverage rolls are administered by the states, so if a state's enrollment fell twenty-three percent that's a state conversation — I'm not saying Indiana, don't put Indiana in my mouth.”
The Treasury Department will automatically enroll millions of children in Trump Accounts under new rules released Tuesday, eliminating the need for parents to sign up for the investment program. The auto enrollment will create accounts for more than 60 million additional children under the age of 18, according to department guidance. The…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
