The federal government wants to know if it’s actually teaching Americans anything about money — and it’s asking the public to weigh in before the answer gets any more embarrassing.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a formal request for information on February 3, 2026, published in the Federal Register, inviting stakeholders across the country to help shape the next version of the U.S. National Strategy for Financial Literacy. The strategy, last revised in 2020, guides how the federal government approaches financial education — from classrooms to retirement planning offices. Comments are due by April 6, 2026.
At the center of the effort is the Financial Literacy and Education Commission, or FLEC, the interagency body tasked with coordinating financial education across the federal government. It’s not a glamorous assignment. But officials are treating this particular update as something more than a routine bureaucratic refresh — and the politics around it are hard to miss.
Trump Accounts Enter the Classroom
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made no secret of where he wants the updated strategy to point. At a recent FLEC public meeting focused squarely on so-called Trump Accounts — youth investment accounts proposed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Bessent called on federal agencies to weave the accounts into their financial education programming. “Trump Accounts are an opportunity for children to improve their financial literacy by learning about investing, compound growth, and long-term financial planning,” he said.
The argument isn’t entirely without merit. There’s a long-standing body of research suggesting that hands-on experience with financial products — actually holding an account, watching a balance grow or shrink — can be more effective than classroom instruction alone. Bessent leaned into that logic directly, arguing that “financial education is most powerful when it is lived, not just taught. When young people begin saving and investing early, they develop habits, judgment, and confidence that shape a lifetime of financial decision-making,” he noted at a separate Treasury event.
Still, embedding a specific legislative proposal into a national education strategy raises questions about where policy ends and pedagogy begins. The accounts haven’t yet been signed into law, and using federal financial literacy infrastructure to normalize them — before Congress has acted — is the kind of move that tends to draw scrutiny from the opposition and education advocates alike.
What the Current Strategy Actually Covers
The existing 2020 National Strategy identifies five priority areas: basic financial capability, financial education for the military, postsecondary education, housing counseling, and retirement savings and investor education. It’s a reasonable list, if a somewhat predictable one. The question FLEC is now wrestling with is whether that framework still reflects how Americans actually live — and learn — about money.
A lot has changed since 2020. Cryptocurrency went mainstream, then volatile, then mainstream again. The pandemic scrambled household finances in ways that exposed enormous gaps in emergency savings and insurance literacy. Fraud schemes have grown dramatically more sophisticated — AI-generated scams, synthetic identity theft, social engineering targeting older Americans. The updated strategy is expected to address at least some of these emerging threats.
Who’s Being Asked to Weigh In
The RFI casts a wide net. FLEC is soliciting input from state and local governments, K-12 schools, universities, private sector firms, and nonprofit organizations — essentially anyone with a stake in how financial education gets delivered in the United States. The goal, at least on paper, is to ensure programs are relevant, effective, and responsive to actual public needs.
That’s the right instinct. Financial literacy efforts in the U.S. have historically suffered from a fragmentation problem — dozens of agencies running parallel programs with little coordination, inconsistent messaging, and limited evaluation of what actually works. Whether a formal comment period meaningfully fixes that structural issue is another matter. But the process at least creates a record, and a deadline.
The Social Security Administration, for its part, has flagged the comment period for its own network of advocates, a sign that the RFI is being taken seriously across the federal ecosystem — not just at Treasury.
What Comes Next
FLEC is expected to incorporate public feedback into an updated National Strategy that reflects current best practices and new research findings, according to the filing. The timeline for releasing a revised strategy hasn’t been made public. Given Washington’s track record on these things, “annual review” can stretch considerably longer than the calendar suggests.
But the underlying stakes are real. Tens of millions of Americans — many of them young, many of them navigating an increasingly complex financial landscape without much institutional support — are the intended beneficiaries of whatever the government eventually produces. The question isn’t whether financial literacy matters. It obviously does. The question is whether a federal commission, however well-intentioned, can actually move the needle — or whether the most powerful financial education will remain, as Bessent put it, the kind that’s lived rather than taught.
