When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he gave state leaders — not federal regulators — the power to decide whether and how to participate in the first-ever national tax credit scholarship program.

That decision now looms largest in blue states, where Democratic governors and lawmakers must weigh whether to reject the law outright on ideological grounds — or try to reshape it into something that reflects their own values.

“This isn’t the federal voucher program we were worried about five years ago,” said Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the left-leaning Brookings Institution who testified before Congress on earlier versions of the bill. “It still has serious problems — but states now have tools to mold it into something they might actually

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