NEW YORK — The Trump administration is weighing whether to let wealthy donors contribute appreciated company stock directly to Trump Accounts, the federal child-investment program set to officially launch July 4, in a move that would hand high-net-worth donors one of the most powerful charitable-giving tax breaks in the U.S. code, according to a CNBC report Thursday from the publication’s Inside Wealth newsletter. The structure would allow donors to offload appreciated shares without paying any capital-gains tax on the embedded appreciation while simultaneously deducting the full fair-market value of the donated stock against their personal income — the same “double benefit” long enjoyed by donors to donor-advised funds and university endowments. Cash contributions to Trump Accounts carry no comparable advantage.
The Trump Accounts program was created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and codified at Section 530A of the Internal Revenue Code. Every U.S. child born between 2025 and 2028 receives a $1,000 Treasury Department seed deposit at birth. Parents may add up to $5,000 a year in post-tax contributions, and employers may add up to $2,500 a year per employee or dependent — with employer contributions excluded from the employee’s taxable income. The funds are invested in low-cost, diversified U.S. equity index funds and partially unlocked at age 18. Altimeter Capital Chief Executive Brad Gerstner, who has been the lead private-sector advocate for the program through his Invest America nonprofit, clarified on X earlier this month that “100% of all $$ in Trump Accounts will be in a free index fund that tracks the S&P 500.” Official cash contributions open July 4, 2026.
The mechanics of the proposed expansion are straightforward and powerful. Under current charitable-giving rules, a donor who has held an appreciated stock for more than one year and donates it directly to a qualified charity avoids federal capital-gains tax — up to 20% on long-term gains, plus a 3.8% net investment income surcharge for higher earners — and is permitted to deduct the stock’s fair-market value against ordinary income. For a billionaire founder sitting on, say, $100 million of stock with a $1 million cost basis, donating the shares rather than selling them and donating the cash saves more than $23 million in capital-gains taxes while still producing a $100 million income-tax deduction. Cash donations produce only the deduction. The structure is the single reason most large philanthropic gifts in the U.S. are made in appreciated stock rather than cash.
The program already has a marquee donor commitment in place. Michael Dell, founder and chief executive of Dell Technologies Inc., and his wife Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion in December to seed Trump Accounts for roughly 25 million children age 10 and under living in ZIP codes with median household income at or below $150,000. The pledge structure, classified by the Internal Revenue Service as a “qualified general contribution” routed through Treasury, distributes $250 per eligible child. Additional corporate and family-office commitments to state-level and employer-matched contributions have come from Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, BlackRock Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., Robinhood Markets Inc., and The Charles Schwab Corp. Robinhood has been designated as the initial trustee for the broader Trump Accounts program — a role that has drawn separate scrutiny in connection with President Trump’s Q1 stock-disclosure filing this week, which showed new personal positions in both Robinhood and Dell.
The legal mechanics of whether Treasury can simply allow stock donations or whether Congress must amend Section 530A are unsettled. Tax-policy experts who spoke with CNBC were split. Manoj Viswanathan, law professor and co-director of UC Law San Francisco’s Center on Tax Law, said he believes an act of Congress would not be required unless Treasury also wanted to permit the accounts to hold individual shares of stock rather than auto-converting donated shares to broad index-fund holdings. Will McBride, chief economist of the Tax Foundation, said an expansion of charitable-giving tax benefits “would face an uphill battle in Congress with a razor-thin Republican majority” but added that “this initiative has Trump’s name on it, so I think they’re going to try to make this as taxpayer-friendly as possible.” Ellen Aprill, senior scholar in residence at UCLA School of Law, said the bigger tax benefit for the ultra-wealthy may not be the income-tax side at all — but rather estate-tax planning, because charitable deductions for gift and estate-tax purposes are unlimited. “Making charitable gifts gets the assets out of their estate and still avoids tax on the built-in capital gain,” she said. “The gift-tax treatment deduction matters a lot to the super rich.”
The administration is keeping its options open publicly. Daniel Aronowitz, head of the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, said Tuesday at a Washington event hosted by law firm Mayer Brown that EBSA is working with Treasury on expanding the categories of donations the accounts can accept. A White House official told CNBC that the administration “is always open to finding new ways to build on the immense success of Trump Accounts” but had no updates to share. A Treasury Department spokesperson declined to comment on the specific possibility of accepting stock donations, saying only that the agency “is committed to maximizing the impact of Trump Accounts, driving sign-ups for all eligible children, and achieving our goal of having every American child own a Trump Account.” Gerstner’s Invest America account on X has separately mused about the symbolism of children eventually receiving a share of SpaceX, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., or OpenAI through such donations — though Gerstner himself has emphasized that any donated stock would be converted to index-fund exposure, not held individually.
The policy critique writes itself. The proposal would expand a charitable-giving deduction structure that the NYU Tax Law Center has already characterized as “an expansion of philanthropy deductions already used by ultra-wealthy donors.” Critics will note that the largest single beneficiaries of an income-tax deduction at marginal rates near 40% — paired with the avoided 23.8% capital-gains tax — are by definition the highest-income, highest-asset donors in the country. Supporters will counter that the program directly addresses wealth-distribution concerns by routing billionaire founder wealth into the S&P 500 accounts of millions of lower- and middle-income American children, and that, as McBride noted, “for many of the very top billionaires, much of their wealth is held in stock that’s appreciated a great deal, so they’re sitting on a lot of unrealized gains.” With the official program launch less than two months away, the timing of any decision by Treasury or Congress will determine whether the next wave of billionaire commitments looks anything like the Dell pledge in scale.
— JBizNews Desk
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