Senate Passes A Different Version Of Federal School Vouchers
Voucher supporters beat back a late night attempt to remove the federal school voucher tax shelter language from Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, but the Senate ultimately approved language with some significant differences from the House version.
At 2:15 AM Tuesday morning, Senator Hirono, along with Senators Reed, Kaine and van Hollen proposed an amendment that would have removed the federal voucher language. That amendment came up one vote short of passage.
However, the language in the bill that passed on Tuesday is different from the House version. Leigh Dingerson, a public school advocate who works with In The Public Interest passed along updates from Washington.
The federal voucher is proposed as a tax credit scholarship, meaning that every dollar taxpayers put into the voucher program is a dollar of revenue the federal government does not collect (and for which each donor gets a dollar for dollar tax credit, a deal unlike any available for other donation credits). The House version has a cap on the amount of tax revenue the government will give up; the Senate version has no such cap.
However, the House version allowed donors to give up to 10% of their income to the voucher program, the Senate version limits donations to no more than $1,700.
The House version would impose school vouchers on states that do not have voucher programs of their own. The Senate version allows states to opt in to the program. Scholarship granting organizations would only be able to administer the program in their own state; the House version left open the possibility that an SGO could fund programs in other states.
I am going to paste in another substack link here. It's not my own! It isn't perfectly connected to vouchers - but read on, it still makes sense to connect it here.
In Florida, vouchers are going strong and that means they are weakening public education.
Some of the architects of Project 2025 and those who are among the strongest voices attacking public education are Trustees of a Florida state school: the New College of Florida.
I'm an alum of that school and I know a LOT about the awful things done by those Trustees and the installed, likely-corrupt President of the school. You know who knows even more about some of the really important financial pieces? Cathy Antunes. It's Cathy's substack that I'm linking to here. https://cathyantunes.substack.com/p/open-the-books-part-one
I hope @PeterGreene reads it and that all of you, his wonderful readership, like and promote it.
It's important.
It's important for New College. Even more important, anything that helps to bring the installed leadership of New College down, helps to bring down Project 2025. The new Trustees of New College are among the big authors and proponents of the education components of Project 2025. Share this information that Cathy Antunes provides. Help highlight their financial incompetence. Thank you for considering!
https://cathyantunes.substack.com/p/open-the-books-part-one