Jason Garcia reports out of Florida on a scheme to make the rich even richer thanks to Donald Trump’s federal school voucher plan:
A brand-new company backed by a venture capital fund connected to right-wing billionaire Charles Koch could get $2 million from Florida taxpayers under an eleventh-hour earmark that top lawmakers have agreed to add to the new state budget.
Pushed by House Speaker Danny Perez (R-Miami), the provision orders the Florida Department of Education to procure an online platform that can be used to implement a new system of federally funded private school scholarships created by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the mammoth tax-and-spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law last year.
The budget instructions do not reference a specific vendor. But they do explicitly require the procurement of a “Unified Program Management Infrastructure” — the precise term currently being trademarked by a company called “LearningSpring,” a Denver-based startup that peddles software to state governments to administer school choice programs like private school vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships