‘Gold Cards’: How Trump Wants to Eliminate National Debt

If previous statements from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick remain true, then the United States could roll out its “gold card” program soon—an unprecedented initiative to sell US residency to wealthy clients in order to raise revenue.

To be sure, there has been much talk of these gold cards, but with no implementation to date. If it actually came to pass, the gold card program—or “Trump card,” as the president calls it—would be a novel revenue source for the United States.

The idea first came to the forefront in February, when President Donald Trump proposed selling U.S. residency for $5 million a person to draw down the national debt.

Predicting that they would begin selling cards in two weeks, Trump said in February, “If we sell 10 million, which is possible … that’s $50 trillion. That means our debt is totally paid off, and we have $15 trillion above that."

The program has yet to become reality, but Lutnick said at an Axios event in May that the cards could be rolled out soon.

“I expect there will be a website up called ‘trumpcard.gov’ in about a week,” said Lutnick. “The details of that will come soon after, but people can start to register and all that will come over a matter of the next weeks. Not months, weeks.”

He again promoted the program as a revenue generator, saying, “This is for people who can help America pay off its debt.”

Despite the program not being implemented yet, some immigration lawyers say they have heard a lot of interest from clients.

"We have already received genuine and committed interest from clients across our more than 60 offices worldwide … with affluent Indian and Bangladeshi nationals expressing a keen interest to apply at an exclusive event we held in Singapore last week," Henley & Partners immigration lawyer Dominic Volek told Newsweek.

The United States would not be the first country to sell visas to wealthy clients.

Spain, for example, recently ended its “Golden Visa” program in April, which it had operated for 12 years. Under that plan, residency was sold for a minimum of 500,000 euros. (At the current exchange rate, that's about $570,223.)

This policy was ended by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who argued that it made housing more difficult to obtain for Spanish nationals. 

Up to 2023, the program sold about 6,200 visas, according to Transparency International, with 2,712 of the purchasers being Chinese. Coming in second for the most purchases were Russians (1,159), while Iranians were in third place with 203.

Some doubt the feasibility of such a program in the United States.

“Right now, there is no real program and no details of the program, and there's no law. There’s just a lot of marketing and warming up the market, so you can't even really advise anybody about it, because the law doesn't exist,” Nuri Katz, the founder of Apex Capital Partners, a firm that advises clients on immigration, told Forbes.