# Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act

This bill creates a federal tax credit that lets individuals and corporations reduce their taxes by donating money to scholarship organizations that help students pay for private school tuition and other educational expenses. Think of it as the government offering a tax break to people who fund scholarships for K-12 students.

Here's how it works in practice: If you earn $100,000 and donate $5,000 to an eligible scholarship organization, you can claim up to $5,000 as a credit against your federal income taxes (though the credit is capped at 10 percent of your income). For corporations, the credit is capped at 5 percent of their taxable income. The money you donate goes directly to scholarship organizations, which then award scholarships to individual students. Those students can use the scholarships to attend private schools, religious schools, or pay for other educational services like tutoring or career training programs.

The bill sets a national spending cap of $5 billion per year on these tax credits and divides that money among states based on their population of school-age children and the number of low-income families. States can then identify which scholarship organizations in their state are eligible to receive these tax-credited donations. The bill includes protections stating that private schools and religious schools cannot be excluded from participating, and it emphasizes that this is about funding students, not schools themselves—meaning the scholarships don't count as income for the student's family and won't affect eligibility for other federal assistance programs.

Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act

Owens, Burgess

Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act This bill allows individual and corporate taxpayers a tax credit for cash contributions to tax-exempt scholarship-granting organizations for elementary and secondary education expenses. It imposes a cap of $5 billion on the amount of contributions that qualify for a tax credit. The bill directs the Department of Education, in coordination with the Department of the Treasury, to establish, host, and maintain a web portal that (1) lists all eligible scholarship-granting organizations; (2) enables contributions to such organizations; (3) provides information about the benefits of this bill; and (4) enables a state to submit and update information about its programs and scholarship-granting organizations, including information on student eligibility and allowable educational expenses.