Universal School Choice Act
SB1810, titled the Universal School Choice Act, would create a federal tax-credit program to encourage donations to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations that fund elementary and secondary education expenses. The bill adds a new individual income tax credit and a corporate tax credit for qualified charitable contributions, subject to annual limits and a national volume cap. It also defines eligible students, qualified expenses, and the requirements an organization must meet to receive and distribute scholarship funds.
The bill allows scholarship funds to be used for a broad range of education costs, including tuition, fees, curricula, books, online materials, tutoring, testing, dual enrollment, disability-related therapies, and transportation. It expressly includes home-schooling expenses and covers public, private, and religious schools. The bill also exempts certain scholarship amounts from gross income, restricts double benefits, and establishes rules for audits, income verification, anti-self-dealing, and distribution deadlines for scholarship organizations.
The bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code to add new sections 25F and 45BB, create a new income exclusion under section 139J, and add a new excise-tax-style enforcement provision in chapter 42 for scholarship-granting organizations that fail to distribute receipts. It would also modify related tax tables and credit coordination rules. In practical terms, it would reduce federal tax liability for individuals and corporations that donate to qualifying scholarship organizations, while imposing compliance, reporting, and distribution requirements on those organizations and limiting the charitable deduction for contributions already used for the new credit.
The available record shows no committee transcript and no recorded votes, so there is no documented debate or formal sentiment from legislative proceedings in the provided materials. Based on the bill text, the measure is framed positively as a school-choice and parental-autonomy proposal, with strong protections for private, religious, and home-school education options. The structure of the bill suggests support for expanding educational choice through tax incentives and scholarship funding.
The main points of contention likely concern the bill’s use of federal tax credits to subsidize private education, including religious schools and home-schooling, and the extent to which public funds are indirectly supporting nonpublic education. The bill also includes explicit language barring government control over scholarship organizations and private or religious schools, which may be viewed as protective by supporters but controversial by opponents who favor stronger public oversight. Additional potential concerns include the national $10 billion volume cap, the state allocation formula, income-priority rules for scholarships, and the administrative burden of audits, income verification, and compliance requirements for scholarship-granting organizations.