First Federal School Voucher Program Passes Senate
July 01, 2025
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For the last 24 hours the Senate has been voting on a slew of amendments to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. While initially on Friday the Parliamentarian struck out the voucher program, after considerable negotiations with Republicans she agreed to a significantly revised version of the nation鈥檚 first federal private school voucher program. You can read AASA鈥檚 statement here.
This morning at about 2:15 am, Senator Hirono, along with Senators Reed, Kaine and van Hollen, presented an amendment on the floor of the Senate to strike the voucher section altogether. That amendment needed 51 votes to pass. It got 50. All the Democrats voted in favor. We needed 4 Republicans to get to 51 and instead we only had 3: Senators Fischer, Collins and Murkowski.
The voucher language currently in the bill has some important differences from where we started. Here are some key changes to the bill:
- The tax credit is permanent, and now unlimited. There is no federal ceiling on how much can be spent. Republicans removed the $4 billion volume cap on the total amount of donations.
- The current language limits the amount a donor can get a tax credit on: The text now allows any individual to donate to a voucher nonprofit for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit worth $1,700 (rather than 10% of adjusted gross income originally). There is also no tax shelter that allows for a donation of stock or marketable securities.
- The Senate has removed the provision asserting that there shall be no Federal control over private or religious schools. In other words, the door has been opened to federal regulation of schools funded with federal vouchers. The bill provides broad authority for the Secretary of Treasury to regulate the program, including explicit authority to regulate scholarship granting organizations and opening the door to regulate private schools.
- Finally, there is no longer a mandate that states have a voucher program. States can voluntarily choose whether to set up voucher nonprofits (or scholarship granting organizations as they are referred to in the bill). They do not have to set up any system for funding private schooling or homeschooling. The voucher nonprofits can only administer school vouchers within their state and States can regulate them and the private schools they work with to a great degree.
While last night's voucher vote was extremely disheartening, it was a massive accomplishment - due in part to the advocacy of superintendents across the country - that the vote was as close as it was.
