Who's fighting §25F, and on what grounds: the unions, Democrats, and a repeal bill

For donors weighing a contribution and operators thinking about launching a Scholarship Granting Organization, it's worth understanding who is fighting the federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC / ECCA / §25F) and why, because the opposition is organized, well-funded, and unlikely to fade before the program launches January 1, 2027. It runs along three fronts: the national teachers' unions, Democratic lawmakers in Congress, and a handful of state education boards. The throughline is a single framing, that a tax credit for donations to scholarship organizations is a private-school voucher by another name, one that diverts public resources from public schools.

The unions are the loudest voice. In a formal comment dated December 26, 2025, the National Education Association called §25F “a nationwide private school voucher program that diverts public resources away from public education.” The position is not new: a joint NEA and AFT resolution, on the books since 1982, flatly opposes efforts to “direct public funds to non-public independent and church-run schools by means of tuition tax credits,” arguing they damage the funding base of public schools and risk a “class education system.” What's notable is the tactical shift in the NEA's 2025 comment, rather than seeking to kill the credit through the rulemaking, it asked Treasury for aggressive state oversight and to treat federal law as “a floor, not a ceiling” on state requirements, the precise position Treasury's June preview appears to reject. The unions sharpened the message in mid-2026: on June 23, AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Becky Pringle issued a joint open letter urging every Democratic governor to refuse to opt in, calling §25F “a Trojan horse carrying near-universal K-12 private school vouchers” and pinning a roughly $50 billion annual price tag on it. The timing was deliberate, landing days before the NEA's July Representative Assembly and the AFT's July convention, but it is an exhortation rather than a legal lever: the unions cannot stop a state that has already opted in, and several Democratic governors have moved to participate anyway, with North Carolina's Josh Stein going so far as to look for ways to route the credit toward public-school students. The Representative Assembly itself, held July 3-7 in Denver, delivered the follow-through in rhetoric: NEA Executive Director Kim Anderson told delegates that “for the first time ever, we're up against a federal voucher program” and called for “more governors willing to reject it, state by state,” naming Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Rhode Island as the model. It is the same posture in a louder room, a campaign to persuade holdout governors, with no mechanism to reverse the 30 states already on the IRS's official roster or to move the January 1, 2027 launch date. The AFT followed at its own convention in Washington, adopting a resolution on July 19, 2026, “Keep Public Funds for Public Schools,” that opposes the credit, referring to it by its public-law number as “the Federal Education Tax Credit established under P.L. 119-21,” and pledges the union's support for the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act; notably the resolution never uses the terms “§25F” or “Education Freedom Tax Credit.” Maryland Governor Wes Moore, speaking at that same convention, called the program a “tax scheme” that steers public funding toward private schools, his sharpest language yet, though Maryland has still made no formal decision. Like the letter and the assembly floor speeches, an adopted union resolution and a governor's rhetoric are exhortations, not levers: neither unwinds a completed state election nor changes the federal launch date.

The legislative front is more direct. Senate Democrats introduced a bill in April 2026 to repeal the credit outright, a long shot in the current Congress but a marker of where the party's base sits, and in June 2026 House Democrats led by Reps. Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan added a companion bill, H.R. 9289, the “Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act,” introduced June 11 and referred to the Ways and Means Committee, making the repeal push bicameral. The House bill has drawn dozens of Democratic cosponsors but no Republican support and no committee action. Both are best read as position-setting rather than a near-term threat: §25F was enacted only last year through reconciliation, Republicans control both chambers, and there is no path to repeal over a presidential veto, so the statute's foundation is not in immediate danger. At the state level, the opposition has begun to harden from resolutions into actual law. On June 18, 2026, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee signed H7163, a first-known “double-lock” statute that bars the state from opting into §25F unless both the General Assembly and the governor agree, stripping any future governor of the power to make the IRS advance election alone. Its near-term effect is small, McKee had shown no intention of opting in, and because the credit is federal rather than state-funded, Rhode Island donors can still contribute to qualifying Scholarship Granting Organizations in states that have opted in and claim the credit, but it is the clearest sign yet that opponents are moving from rhetoric to statute where they hold the votes. Michigan's State Board of Education voted in May 2026 to urge Governor Gretchen Whitmer not to opt the state in, and in Maryland the state teachers' union (MSEA) has warned that the program's roughly $50 billion in projected annual federal cost could crowd out other education funding. These are not fringe actors, they are the institutional core of the public-education establishment in blue and purple states.

One feature of §25F is that Congress wrote it expecting a court fight. The statute gives any parent of a student who has received a scholarship the right to intervene to defend the law's constitutionality in any state or federal challenge, a clear nod to anticipated Establishment Clause litigation over public support flowing to religious schools. The precedent cuts toward the program's defenders: in a 2011 Arizona case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that taxpayers lacked standing to challenge a state tuition-tax-credit program, reasoning that a tax credit is not a government expenditure. For now the opposition to §25F is political and regulatory rather than judicial, but the intervention clause suggests the drafters expect that to change. We track each state's posture on the participation map, and explain the program itself in what is the FSTC.