Maine, the state the Supreme Court ordered to fund religious schools, is sitting out §25F

There is no state where sitting out the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit (§25F) is more striking than Maine. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carson v. Makin that Maine could not bar religious schools from its town-tuitioning program, the arrangement under which towns too small to run their own high school pay tuition to a public or approved private school the family chooses. Maine had limited that money to “nonsectarian” schools; the Court held, 6 to 3, that excluding schools because they are religious violates the Free Exercise Clause. The practical result is that Maine already sends public dollars directly to religious schools, a more direct flow than §25F’s donor-credit mechanism ever contemplates. And yet, as the federal credit moves toward its January 1, 2027 launch, Maine is not in it.

When the IRS published its official roster of 27 participating states on June 8, 2026, Maine was absent. The list ran from Alabama to Wyoming and included every neighbor that had moved, but not Maine, which has filed no advance election and submitted no list of qualifying Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Nor is the gap a matter of paperwork lagging a decision: Gov. Janet Mills (D) has issued no statement on §25F in either direction, neither the opt-in that a governor makes by filing IRS Form 15714 nor a formal decline of the kind Oregon’s Gov. Kotek issued. Maine simply has not engaged.

The legislative door for 2026 is now shut. The 132nd Maine Legislature adjourned its Second Regular Session sine die at the end of April 2026 without taking up a §25F enabling or SGO-certification bill, so absent a special session the state cannot act through statute until 2027. That timing matters because of who will be making the call. Mills is term-limited and cannot run in November 2026, which means the governor who would actually administer a Maine opt-in for the program’s first live year, 2027, will be someone elected this fall. A sitting governor with nothing to gain politically and a successor not yet chosen is a recipe for exactly the silence Maine is producing.

It would be a mistake to read Maine’s absence as hostility to publicly funded private schooling, because Carson makes Maine an awkward fit for the usual blue-state objections. The argument other Democratic-led states have pressed, that they want room to write their own conditions onto participating SGOs, runs into a wall in a state the Supreme Court has already told it cannot single out religious schools for worse treatment. The unresolved federalism question of whether §25F is a federal floor or a ceiling on state add-ons is, in Maine, layered on top of a constitutional command that narrows what the state may do in the first place. Maine’s posture looks less like the principled refusals of Minnesota or the holdouts we track among Democratic governors and more like a state that has chosen not to decide.

For Maine donors, families, and anyone weighing whether to stand up an SGO in the state, the takeaway is plain: there is no §25F path in Maine before the 2027 launch unless Mills files an advance election on her way out or her successor moves quickly after taking office. The federal credit’s mechanics are unaffected by Maine’s choice: donors in participating states can give up to $1,700 to a qualified SGO and claim a dollar-for-dollar federal credit, the fixed figure we explain in why the credit is $1,700, not $3,400. Maine’s status, and every other state’s, is tracked on our Maine state page and the national participation map; operators who want the infrastructure ready in case Maine ever moves can start with our explainers and the SGO directory.