Most states plug into §25F through the governor or the revenue department. Kentucky's House Bill 1, enacted over Gov. Andy Beshear's veto, did something different: it put the state's advance election, its qualifying-SGO list, and the program's rulemaking under Secretary of State Michael Adams, a design built to keep participation out of a hostile governor's hands.
When a state joins the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit (FSTC / ECCA / §25F), someone inside state government has to run it: file the advance election with the U.S. Treasury, certify which Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) qualify, submit that list to the IRS, and keep it current every year. In most states that job sits with the governor or the department of revenue. Kentucky put it somewhere unusual. House Bill 1, the 2026 act that opted Kentucky in, assigns the entire function to the Secretary of State, currently Michael Adams, and it codifies the program inside KRS Chapter 14, the chapter that governs the Secretary of State's office. For any organization that wants to operate as a Kentucky SGO, that is the single most important administrative fact about the state: the office you answer to is not the one most people would guess.
The choice was structural, not incidental, and the veto fight explains it. Kentucky reached §25F the hard way, over Gov. Andy Beshear's objection: Beshear vetoed HB 1 on March 13, 2026, the House overrode him on March 16, and the Senate completed the veto override on March 17, making the bill law that day. A legislature that has just forced a program past a hostile governor has an obvious problem, the same governor's executive branch would normally administer it. Routing the annual election and the SGO list through the independently elected Secretary of State, rather than a department the governor controls, is the legislature's answer: it insulates Kentucky's participation from a chief executive who fought it, and removes any future governor's ability to quietly stall the paperwork the law now requires.
The statute is specific about what the office must do. The Secretary of State is the sole official authorized to report Kentucky's election to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and to submit the state's list of qualifying SGOs, and the list must go to Treasury by January 1 of each year. The office is directed to publish administrative regulations and guidance on a website, is empowered to promulgate those regulations, and may collect a fee from SGOs (and accept private contributions) to cover the program's costs. That fee, set by regulation rather than fixed in the statute, is the one distinctly Kentucky requirement an SGO should budget for; beyond it, the enacted law layers nothing onto the federal §25F eligibility rules.
For anyone building an SGO, this is the practical scaffolding the whole program runs on, and Kentucky is a useful illustration of a question every participating state has to answer: which officer owns the list. It is the same question West Virginia left unresolved when HB 4588 stalled and the state adjourned without designating an administrator. Kentucky answered it cleanly and early, and named an office structurally shielded from the governor. Operators eyeing Kentucky should plan around the Secretary of State's forthcoming regulations and administrative fee, and watch that office, not the governor's, for the application process.
One caveat keeps Kentucky in the same boat as everyone else on timing: naming the administrator is not the same as opening the door. As of mid-2026 no state, Kentucky included, has actually opened SGO certification, because the mechanics are gated on Treasury's proposed regulations expected at the end of September, a hold we cover in our piece on why SGO certification has not opened anywhere. What Kentucky has settled is the who and the where; the when still runs on the federal clock. Kentucky's status is tracked on our Kentucky state page and the national participation map, and founders weighing a Kentucky program can start with our guide to starting an SGO and the SGO directory.
