President DeSantis: School Choice Goes Federal

Photo: File:A classroom in a modern public high school in the United States — Hayesville High School, North Carolina 04.jpg by Harrison Keely, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Ron DeSantis's education record is the most complete state implementation of the school-choice movement anywhere in the country. In March 2023 he signed HB 1, which eliminated income eligibility restrictions and enrollment caps on Florida's scholarship programs, making it the first state with genuinely universal private-school choice — his office called it the largest expansion of education choice in U.S. history, at a signing event at a private Catholic high school in Miami. In January 2026 he opted Florida into the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit created by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, telling reporters the state-federal combination 'will supplement the great stuff we're already doing here.'

That is the verifiable record. This article is not a prediction. This is scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, AP describes Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as potential 2028 Democratic contenders and reports Republican discussion around JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz; most figures profiled have not formally entered a presidential race. The scenario question is almost unusual among these pieces: a President DeSantis would not need to create federal school choice in his first 100 days — a Republican Congress and a Republican administration already built most of it in 2025. The interesting question is what a president who made this his signature issue would do with the machinery that already exists.

02 Day 1: executive orders

Because the Education Freedom Tax Credit and the 529 expansions are already statute, a DeSantis day one is administration, not creation: executive orders directing the Treasury and the IRS to maximize the visibility and simplicity of the $1,700 credit (which begins for taxpayers January 1, 2027); directing the Education Department to accelerate its reorganization around program administration rather than regulation; and instructing the agency to pressure the roughly half of states that have not yet opted into the federal credit program to do so — the same bully-pulpit-plus-grant-leverage combination he used as governor.

The second day-one move is the one DeSantis previewed in January 2026 himself: he praised Secretary McMahon 'for implementing this as well as dismantling the bureaucracy that is the United States Department of Education.' A full dismantling requires Congress — the department was created by statute in 1979 — but a day-one order reorganizing its functions, freezing new rulemaking, and proposing the statutory split is exactly the kind of symbolic-first, substance-second move that defined his Florida playbook: fight the institution, then pass the law.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

The first month would be opt-in season. As of late January 2026, 24 states had joined the federal tax-credit program — and DeSantis's own observation was the strategic key: 'a state that's inclined for school choice has probably done something on its own,' so the real target is states like Illinois, New York, and California that have strong charter sectors but no private-school-choice programs. A DeSantis White House would task the Education Department with an aggressive campaign — conferences, model legislation, technical assistance — to convert holdout states, plus 529 guidance implementing the 2025 expansions (the $20,000 K-12 withdrawal cap and first-time homeschool eligibility) with maximum permissiveness.

The accountability question follows immediately. At the Valrico announcement, DeSantis flagged the risk himself: 'What we don't want is for the schools to just simply see this money is there and raise the tuition.' Florida's HB 1 answered that with testing and reporting requirements on participating schools; the federal program is lighter-touch by design. Expect the first month to include a fight over whether federal SGOs (scholarship-granting organizations) carry any quality strings — a fight between the choice movement's deregulatory wing and its standards wing that DeSantis, whose Florida program does impose testing, is unusually positioned to referee.

04 The first budget

A DeSantis first budget would make the philosophy legible in three moves. First: Title I portability — letting federal low-income funding follow the student rather than the district, which is the single biggest federal lever for choice and has been blocked in Congress since the 1990s. Second: IDEA (special-education) funding shifted toward block grants or portable accounts, which the choice movement has long sought and disability-advocacy groups split on. Third: a smaller, reorganized Education Department request that moves civil-rights enforcement elsewhere and frames residual functions as grant administration.

The trade the budget makes explicit: school choice's federal funding is currently a tax expenditure (foregone revenue, $1,700 per donor) rather than an appropriation, and the 2025 law's authors chose that route because it survives reconciliation and shrinks the visible federal footprint. A DeSantis OMB would keep it that way. The budget's honest footnote is that Florida's own program costs are state dollars — roughly $8,500-$8,700 average per student by legislative estimates — and no federal tax credit comes close to replacing that scale; the federal layer supplements, not substitutes, exactly as DeSantis said in January.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

Three things a DeSantis school-choice presidency genuinely needs from Congress. First, the statutory dismantling of the Education Department — the 2025 approach was reorganization and reassignment; actually abolishing the agency requires a new statute, and under the Senate rules that is a 60-vote proposition that failed even in Trump's first term. Second, raising the $1,700 credit or converting it into a larger program — tax law, so reconciliation-eligible, and the most plausible first-legislation win. Third, Title I portability: ordinary education law, which historically needs bipartisan votes that have never materialized, though the coalition is wider now than in 2017.

The 2025 precedent shows the viable path: the largest federal school-choice expansion in history passed not as an education bill but as a tax bill, through reconciliation, without a single Democratic vote. A DeSantis legislative strategy would rationally repeat that pattern — everything through the tax code, nothing through the authorizing committees where Democrats can filibuster. The first 100 days would measure how much of that can be drafted and scheduled before the first budget reconciliation window opens.

06 The comparative question: the GOP field, post-2025

The 2025 federal law collapsed most of the daylight between DeSantis and the rest of the prospective Republican field on school choice — Vance, Rubio, Cruz and Trump all supported the tax-credit expansion, and Cruz's school-choice advocacy predates all of them (he has introduced federal ESA legislation since 2017). What DeSantis brings that the others do not is implementation proof: a universal program running at scale since 2023, with roughly 1.4 million students in choice settings, testing requirements attached, and now a federal layer opted into from day one. The argument among Republicans is no longer whether to go federal but who has governed it best.

Against the Democratic field the contrast is the total one that has defined American education politics for two decades: Newsom, Whitmer, and Shapiro have all expanded charter or funding programs but oppose public funding of private religious schooling, and the teachers' unions — the most organized interest in Democratic politics — treat the 2025 tax credit as an existential threat. DeSantis is uniquely positioned to run as the candidate who has already beaten the political machine the others would face: the Florida Education Association has fought him on every step of HB 1, and he won the state by 19 points the year after signing it. That is the whole argument for a DeSantis education presidency in one sentence — and its limit: Florida is not the country, and the suburbs that swung against Trump in 2018 over education are not Tampa.

07 What courts could constrain

Two legal walls constrain the federal program, both well-mapped. The first is state constitutional: roughly three dozen states have Blaine amendments — provisions barring public aid to religious schools — and while the Supreme Court has hollowed them out from Espinoza v. Montana (2020) through Carson v. Makin (2022), the federal tax-credit program was deliberately structured on the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris model (money follows private choice through nonprofit intermediaries) precisely so it does not trigger them. Lawsuits will come anyway in states like Michigan, whose Blaine amendment is unusually strict; the credit's design gives it strong defenses.

The second is federal administrative and constitutional law. The IRS's list of eligible occupations and SGO certifications for the credit are APA-reviewable; Establishment Clause challenges will be filed on the theory that a tax credit is a subsidy (the Zelman Court's answer is 'no, when individual choice intervenes'); and any attempt to dismantle the Education Department by reorganization alone will hit the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the APA's reorganization limits, and — for the civil-rights functions — statutory duties that cannot be unassigned without new law. The 100-day legal forecast: the existing program survives its first challenges, the dismantling-by-executive-order attempt enjoined in part, and the real constitutional test — portability of Title I through a religious-school choice — queued for a later Supreme Court term.