The federal Scholarship Tax Credit has organized opposition on three fronts, the teachers' unions, Democratic lawmakers, and some state education boards, all built around a single framing: that a tax credit for scholarship donations is a national voucher that drains public schools.
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 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. At the state level, 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.
