On June 23, 2026, Assembly Concurrent Resolution 229 became the first formal legislative vehicle asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to file California's advance election into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit (§25F). The measure is non-binding, but it puts a hard number on what the nation's largest state is leaving on the table: up to $4.91 billion in scholarship contributions between 2027 and 2029.
California has spent the §25F wave on the sidelines, and on June 23, 2026 the question of whether it should stay there finally reached the floor of the Legislature. Assemblymember Josh Hoover introduced Assembly Concurrent Resolution 229, titled the “Federal Education Freedom Tax Credit,” urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to “exercise his executive authority to promptly submit California's election to participate” in the federal program and directing state agencies to designate qualifying Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in time for the January 1, 2027 launch. Coauthored by Assembly Members Castillo, Hadwick, and Sanchez, it is the first formal legislative measure of any kind to press California's governor on §25F, and it arrives with a number attached that is hard to ignore: by the resolution's own estimate, if California opts in it could access up to $4.91 billion in scholarship contributions between 2027 and 2029 alone.
It is worth being precise about what the resolution is and is not. A concurrent resolution expresses the will of the Legislature; it does not change law and cannot compel the governor to act. As of its latest action, ACR-229 had come from the printer and was awaiting committee referral, the earliest possible stage. In a Legislature with a Democratic supermajority, a resolution carried by Republican members faces an uncertain path to the floor. What it does accomplish, regardless of whether it advances, is to put the opt-in question on California's official legislative record for the first time and to frame it not as an abstract policy fight but as a concrete, quantified choice about federal dollars the state is currently declining to claim.
California's actual status has not changed. Newsom has taken no public position on §25F, no bill to opt the state in or to authorize an SGO list has advanced in the 2025-2026 session, and California has neither filed Form 15714 nor submitted a list of Scholarship Granting Organizations to Treasury. That leaves the largest state in the country, and by extension the largest single pool of eligible families, absent from a program that 30 states have already joined. The cost of waiting is real but bounded: the opt-in decision is annual, so a governor who declines in 2027 can still elect in for 2028 or any later year. Every year California stays out, though, its residents' credit-eligible dollars flow to scholarship organizations in other states rather than to children at home.
What makes ACR-229 notable is that it is the second distinct constituency to press Newsom on the same point from a very different direction. Earlier this year a grassroots effort out of a Los Angeles parish school, the Purple Postcard Campaign, mobilized more than 1,100 students and a Democratic-aligned coalition, including Democrats for Education Reform and the California Catholic Conference, to urge the governor to opt in. Now the case is being made inside the Capitol as well. The through-line in both is the argument that has moved governors across the spectrum: §25F does not spend a state's own money. It lets a state's residents redirect federal tax they would otherwise owe into scholarships for local children, which is why the choice increasingly reads less as an ideological stance than as a decision about whether to leave several billion dollars unclaimed. Where the broader field of Democratic governors has landed is tracked in our coverage of how Democratic governors have split on §25F.
For anyone weighing whether to build a California SGO, the practical signal is that pressure on Newsom is now coming from both the street and the statehouse, even if the governor's position remains unmoved and the timeline uncertain. Nothing about ACR-229 changes what an operator can do today, and California's sheer scale is the reason to be ready rather than to wait: if the state ever files its election, the demand for scholarship capacity would be larger than in any state already participating. Founders can track California's status and every other state's on our California state page and the national participation map, see the field already forming in the SGO directory, and use our guide to starting an SGO to build the pieces that do not depend on any one governor's decision. The resolution will likely stall in a divided Legislature, but the number it put on the record, up to $4.91 billion, is the clearest statement yet of what California is choosing to forgo.
