On September 16, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) introduced two bills that go after the two parts of Section 25F that practitioners complain about most. The next day, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) filed the Senate companion. If either becomes law, the state-by-state opt-in map that has driven a year of legislative fights, exclusions, and PR announcements stops mattering.
What the bills actually do
H.R. 10412 and its Senate twin, S. 5421, repeal the state opt-in requirement outright. Under current law, a donor can only claim the credit for gifts to an SGO in a state whose governor filed an election with Treasury. That’s the reason we’ve spent the year tracking which of 30-plus states signed up and which didn’t. Repeal it, and the credit works the same in every state, whether that state’s governor ever opted in or not.
H.R. 10413 fixes something narrower but real: married couples filing jointly are currently capped at the same $1,700 as a single filer. The bill doubles it to $3,400 for joint returns.
Smith’s framing matters here: he’s calling this a correction, not an expansion. The opt-in requirement wasn’t in the original design. It got added during 2025 reconciliation review because of the Byrd Rule, the same procedural constraint that shapes everything else about how this credit came into being.
Why “regular order” is the whole story
That’s also the catch. The original credit passed through budget reconciliation, which needs only a simple Senate majority but restricts what can ride along, hence the opt-in requirement in the first place. This new package is not reconciliation. It’s a standalone bill, referred to House Ways and Means and Senate Finance on September 16 and 17. Standalone bills need 60 votes to clear a Senate filibuster.
Right now, S. 5421 has one sponsor. H.R. 10412 has two cosponsors. That’s not momentum. That’s a bill on day one of its life. And it’s sitting in the same Finance Committee as S. 4297, Sen. Mark Kelly’s bill to repeal the credit program altogether, which already has 31 Democratic and independent cosponsors from April.
What actually happens next
Nothing, procedurally, until Ways and Means or Finance schedules a markup, and there’s no sign either has. If a markup happens and the committee votes to report the bill, it goes to the floor under a rule in the House, or needs unanimous consent or 60 votes just to get called up in the Senate. Given the opposition already staked out in Finance, a clean floor vote looks like a long shot in the current environment.
The more realistic path is the same one that created 25F to begin with: attachment to a future reconciliation bill, where it only needs 50 votes plus the Vice President. That requires a reconciliation vehicle to exist at all, which isn’t something Smith or Cassidy control on their own timeline.
What this means for the movement
Read charitably, this is the coalition treating the opt-in requirement as unfinished business rather than a permanent feature of the law: proof that 2025 was meant to be a floor, not a ceiling. Read skeptically, two cosponsors and a Senate bill with a single sponsor is a marker being laid down, not a serious near-term push. Both readings can be true at once. What’s certain is that the fight over federal school choice didn’t end when reconciliation passed. It just moved from one big vote to a slower fight over markups and committee math, running in parallel with an opposition bill that would repeal the whole program. Whether the opt-in requirement survives the year says more about where that fight actually stands than any opt-in announcement has so far.
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