“My first budget will immediately add an additional federal investment of $20 billion towards school choice. This will be done by reprioritizing existing federal dollars.”
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Trump's first budget (FY2018, released May 2017) proposed $1.4 billion for school choice, about 7 percent of the promised $20 billion, and Congress declined to fund its main components (Title I open-enrollment FOCUS grants and private-school scholarships) in the March 2018 omnibus. No $20 billion reprioritization appeared in any of his budgets. In his second term he signed the July 4, 2025 reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21), creating the first federal tax-credit scholarship program, a nonrefundable credit of up to $1,700 per taxpayer for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, effective Jan. 1, 2027. A federal school-choice investment was ultimately enacted, but far later, structured differently, and well below the specific first-budget $20 billion pledge.
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