White House scrambles to fix embarrassing math errors

The Trump White House updated its estimate of how much children can earn from newly launched Trump accounts after criticism that its previous calculations were absurd.

After the accounts launched Wednesday, the Trump account website showed that a potential Trump account recipient would receive $200,000 by age 55 by investing $0 per year.

However, according to the Trump administration’s calculations, investing $250 per year over the same period would have left the recipient with only $192,000, less than if they had invested the money, The Daily Beast originally reported.

After reporting by the Daily Beast identified the discrepancies, the Trump account website quietly updated its prediction of how much a newborn baby could earn from a Trump account over a 55-year period.

The website now states that a Trump account holder will receive $243,000 over a 55-year period if no money is invested in the account.

It says investing $250 per year now yields $878,000, and investing a maximum of $5,000 per year will yield $13 million over 55 years—a staggering increase from the original $2.7 million prediction.

The website says the numbers are “derived from the historical S&P 500 average.”

The White House did not return The Daily Beast’s requests for comment on the various discrepancies.

A fact sheet from the Council of Economic Advisers outlines various investment-in-investment scenarios for Trump accounts. These statistics do not appear to be currently on the Trump Accounts website.

Parents of children born between 2025 and 2028 — the year Trump leaves office — are eligible to sign their children up for the account. The accounts come with an initial deposit of $1,000, funded by the federal government through Trump’s signature tax and spending law, the One Big Beautiful bill.

Parents can sign up their children for accounts using the new, appropriately named IRS Form 4547. The accounts convert to traditional Roth IRAs after the child turns 18.

Even Trump administration officials seem unable to keep the numbers straight.

At a forum during the launch of the Trump account, White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt said that a maximum of $5,000 per year invested in the accounts could reach $1.1 million by the age of 28.

But the website said on Wednesday that the 27-year-old, if the maximum investment is made, will have $377,800 in the account. By Thursday, that estimate had suddenly risen to $742,000.

The president himself claimed that by the time a Trump account holder turns 18, “with every modest contribution, the value of the Trump account must reach at least $50,000.”

He claimed with “slightly larger contributions” that the average Trump account “will grow to $100,000, $200,000, and may grow to over $300,000 per child.”

The Trump account’s updated website, however, says that with $250 a year in contributions, the account will reach $19,000 by age 18.

Math has never been the Trump White House’s strong suit. The president frequently makes up numbers to oversell his economic agenda.

Trump often claims that gas prices nationwide are below $2, a false claim that the president was called out to his face just this week.

On drug prices, Trump has claimed that his administration can reduce prices “1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent” as he claims to use “certain talent” to reach “unattainable numbers.”