In “TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education,” I documented how President Donald Trump has been pursuing education reforms that align with Project 2025, which calls for Trump to push federal “school choice” subsidies, including “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs) and tax credits for corporate donations to “Scholarship Granting Organizations” (SGOs). In the wake of my report, Trump signed into law the omnibus “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” ramming through a school choice rider that resembles the SGO tax credit provisions stipulated in the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA), which is championed in Project 2025.

School choice ESAs and SGO tax credits may afford parents and students with a broader menu of learning options, but not without simultaneously expanding Big Government, Big Business, and Big Tech control over public, private, and home education. To be sure, ESAs and tax-credited “scholarships” are primed to expand government regulation of private, religious, and home schools while publicly subsidizing ed-tech companies that data-mine students’ psychometrics for predictive learning analytics. Not only are ESAs and tax-credited “scholarships” positioned to extend the reaches of government bureaucracies and ed-tech corporations into public, private, and home educationl, but they go even farther, as they are also positioned to usher fin-tech companies into public-private partnerships between ed-tech corporations and government bureaucracies in order to digitally dole out ESAs and “scholarships” to students.

In fact, several fin-tech corporations, including ClassWallet, Odyssey, Student First Technologies (SFT), Merit International, and SAP Ariba, are already specializing in “digital wallets” that streamline ESA and tax-credited “scholarship” payments. Altogether, these fin-tech companies have already contracted with at least 32 state governments to facilitate ESA and “scholarship” payments for public-private school choice programs. Some of these fin-tech corporations, such as ClassWallet, have also contracted with the United States (US) Federal government to digitize emergency education funding for virtual-online “distance learning” during COVID lockdowns. Many of these fin-tech companies and their digital wallets have also been promoted by a Koch–funded regiment of corporatist State Policy Network (SPN) think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), EdChoice, and ExcelinEd –– all of which are affiliates of Project 2025 contributors.

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