In a detailed piece, Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children, examines how seniors and children are used to generate profit for private operators. Within the piece is this pointed analysis of the federal voucher program.
On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law, creating the first federal private school voucher program in American history. The timing, Independence Day, was deliberate political theater. So was the framing for the new voucher program: parental choice, educational freedom, rescuing children from failing schools.
What actually passed was a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for the first $1,700 a taxpayer contributes to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) that distribute private school tuition vouchers. There is no other cause – certainly not children’s hospitals, cancer treatment, veterans groups, or disaster relief that taxpayers can contribute to and have the entire cost reimbursed by the federal government. The credit is roughly three times as generous as what donors get for contributing to a children’s hospital.
The notion that this is “free money” an funded by private donors is false. The tax scheme is uncapped and unlimited, entirely on the dime of the taxpayer. Furthermore, the beneficiary of the tax credit is not the child or parents. It is the donor, the SGO, and the private entities receiving the money.
The money flow is a convoluted one: from the federal Treasury, through a donor, and through an intermediary Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO), which can also rake 10% of the money it raises, and finally to many private schools operating outside the accountability requirements that govern the institutions educating 90% of American children. There will be many people makes billions of dollars – all in the name of kids.
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated the program will cost at least $26 billion over the next decade, but ITEP is projecting costs as high as $51 billion annually, since the final bill contained no aggregate cap.
This is not a scholarship program. It is a publicly subsidized private revenue pipeline, wrapped in the language of helping children. Kids deserve better.