The GOP’s School Voucher Program Is Anti-Populism
The GOP is smuggling a $5 billion school voucher program into the budget reconciliation bill. It’s a major giveaway to wealthy school-privatization boosters — and a slap in the face for many of Donald Trump’s own voters.
A protest outside the Tennessee state Capitol building against Governor Bill Lee's school voucher program on March 12, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Seth Herald / Getty Images)
When it comes to poking holes in the GOP’s claims to now be a populist party of the working class, the effort to shred Medicaid in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy is exhibit A. But I’d make the case that a $5 billion voucher program, smuggled into the text of the budget reconciliation bill this week, may be an even more glaring example of faux populism in action. That’s because the maneuver not only circumvents the will of Donald Trump’s own voters but enriches the very wealthy and decimates public budgets in the process.
A quick recap: The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) of 2025 has now officially made it into the “big, beautiful bill,” the House GOP tax plan that offsets tax cuts with deep cuts to health care for low-income Americans. (Gluttons for punishment should skip to page fifty-seven of the bill where the text of ECCA begins.) The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein covers the basics here:
The program is structured as a $5 billion tax credit, allowing donors to reduce their tax bill by $1 for every $1 they give to nonprofits that grant scholarships — up to 10 percent of the donor’s income. The option to donate is expected to be popular with wealthy taxpayers. The resulting scholarships could be worth $5,000 per child, reaching one million students. Any family who earns less than 300 percent of their area’s median income — which equals over $300,000 in some parts of the country — could use the funds, meaning a vast majority of families would be eligible.
I want to pause here and dwell upon the “popular with wealthy taxpayers” part, because at the heart of ECCA is an effort to capitalize on the deep desire of the wealthy to avoid paying taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) captures this dynamic perfectly in the title of their recent report: “Shelter Skelter: How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization.” Since the report was released in March, I’ve read through it multiple times and am shocked anew with each perusal by the shamelessness of the grift. ITEP’s Carl Davis writes in the report:
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 (ECCA) would use the tax code to privilege nonprofit organizations that give out private K-12 school vouchers. . . . It would do this by reimbursing donors to voucher-bundling groups, in full, with an unprecedented dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit.
According to ITEP, this scheme will ultimately result in a public revenue loss of $136.3 billion over the next ten years. That money will be funneled to “private schools, voucher-bundling organizations, and wealthy donors” — and a whopping 8 percent of that, to the tune of $10.5 billion, “would flow to wealthy families as personal profit.”
The bottom line: not only will the program bring vouchers to all fifty states, including states that have rejected them, but the deep-pocketed donors at the helm of the school-privatization Rolls Royce will now be able to profit off of their efforts to dismantle public schools.
A Slap in the Face for Trump’s Own Voters
“It’s safe to say the Trump coalition was not pulling the lever for Medicaid cuts in November,” wrote Missouri senator Josh Hawley in the New York Times recently. It’s also safe to say that the Trump coalition was not pulling the lever for school vouchers.
We know that because, in multiple states, Trump’s own voters pulled the lever against vouchers, often by staggering margins. Let’s take Kentucky where voters from every single county rejected an amendment to their state constitution that would have opened the door to vouchers — this despite an ad campaign aimed at convincing them that none other than Trump himself wanted them to vote yes.
Lest you think that Kentucky is some kind of anomaly, I encourage you to spend some time reading the report “Voters Reject Vouchers — Again!” As the authors point out, since 1978, “when seven in 10 Michigan voters opposed a private school voucher plan there, choice proposals have consistently lost in state after state, often by overwhelming margins.” That’s why Texas governor Greg Abbott and voucher proponents in that state were so desperate to avoid putting vouchers up for a statewide vote — they could read the tea leaves.
Sneaking a federal voucher program into the tax code enables the GOP to get around the party’s own voters. Indeed, the lead sponsor of ECCA hails from Nebraska, where voters just overwhelmingly rejected a tax credit program very similar to the one that is now about to be forced upon them. And in Kentucky, where voucher proponents have been licking their wounds over the decisiveness of the rebuke from voters this fall, the federal program is viewed as a nifty way to circumvent those same voters, especially rural Kentuckians. Jim Waters, head of the free-market Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, told the Wall Street Journal last year, that “he was taken aback by the breadth of the amendment defeat”:
He said that rural voters have “emotional” connections to local public schools that are difficult to dislodge. He said he hopes a federal choice program is enacted. “That would be especially helpful in Kentucky, to bypass the establishment — they wouldn’t be able to stop this.”
Back to the States?
At Jacobin, the Education Wars, and elsewhere, I’ve been chronicling the tremendous anger over vouchers on the Right. Some of that anger has its origin in a sincere faith that vouchers contradict the ethos of MAGA populism. What can possibly be construed as populist about undermining rural schools, for example, or further lining the pockets of the same wealthy elite that MAGA claims to be against?
Then there are the right-wing activists who view a federal voucher program as an example of the very federal overreach they’re supposed to be against. This, by the way, is a position that the Heritage Foundation, now a major supporter of ECCA, held until about fifteen minutes ago.
These opponents of a federal voucher program on the Right are wary of the expansion of school choice for the same reason that conservatives in Texas, Tennessee, and elsewhere have been pushing back so hard: “strings.” They see a slippery slope in which federal tax credits become a means of imposing regulations on private schools or home schools, like requiring standardized tests. And of course, at a time when Trump et al are loudly extolling the virtues of “sending education back to the states where it so rightly belongs,” imposing vouchers on every state via the federal government might strike some as inconsistent. Like this guy for example, whom the New York Times just cannot get enough of:
“The federal government should extricate itself from K-12 education to the fullest extent possible,” said Christopher Rufo, a leading crusader against diversity programs in schools, and a supporter of school choice. “It’s best left to the states.”
This school voucher scheme is bad — there’s really no way around it. But while we can hold out hope that the “big, beautiful bill” falls apart thanks to the GOP’s own internal contradictions, this “voucher scheme merged into a tax shelter for some of the wealthiest Americans,” as Josh Cowen helpfully describes it, will also exacerbate those contradictions. Cutting Medicaid isn’t populist; neither are school vouchers.