(Just The News)—U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday introduced a federal Universal School Choice Act.
The proposal would allocate up to $10 billion annually in dollar-for-dollar federal tax credits for individuals and businesses nationwide that contribute to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations for elementary and secondary education.
“School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century,” Cruz, R-Texas, said. “Every child in America deserves access to a quality education that meets their individual needs, regardless of race, ethnicity, income, or zip code. I remain committed to leading this fight until universal school choice has become available to every American, and I call upon my colleagues to expeditiously take up and advance this legislation.”
The bill would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a tax credit for charitable donations to nonprofit organizations providing education scholarships to qualified elementary and secondary students for qualified expenses. The tax credit for individuals is 10% of adjusted gross income for a taxable year or $5,000, according to the bill language. For corporations, the tax credit is capped at 5% of taxable income for a taxable year, according to the bill language.
Qualified elementary or secondary education expenses include tuition and fees, curriculum and materials, books or instructional materials, online education materials, tutoring costs, test fees, fees for dual enrollment at higher education institutions, education therapies for disabled students, transportation costs, homeschooling expenses, among others.
The bill would go into effect in 2026, if it passes both chambers and is signed into law. It would allocate $10 billion for calendar year 2026 and each subsequent year. Money is allocated to states with 80% of the funds designated for families with incomes below the poverty line. Funds are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Companion legislation was introduced by U.S. House Republican Reps. Burgess Owens of Utah and Byron Donalds of Florida.
The bill is the latest among several Cruz filed that prioritize education, savings and taxes.
In January, Cruz introduced the Student Empowerment Act to expand a tax-deferred education savings plan previously expanded under the first Trump administration, The Center Square reported. It amends the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to permit kindergarten through grade 12 educational expenses to be paid from a 529 account. A 529 account is a tax-advantaged savings account originally created as a way to help parents save money to cover college expenses. It allows for tax-exempt withdrawals at the federal level and in some states for qualified education expenses.
“It was at the time and remains the most far-reaching federal school choice legislation ever passed,” according to Cruz’s office.
In April, he filed a bill to create Education Savings Accounts for the children of active-duty service members, The Center Square reported. It would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to allow parents of eligible military-dependent children to establish Military Education Savings Accounts.
Earlier this month, Cruz introduced the Universal Savings Account Act to allow American families to save without the restrictions and penalties associated with traditional tax-advantaged accounts. He also introduced a bill authorizing the use of taxpayer funds to be used to invest in savings accounts for U.S. children. This proposal was incorporated into the “big beautiful budget bill” that just passed the House Budget Committee.
In 2019, 2021 and 2023, Cruz also filed the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to create a federal tax credit for taxpayers who donate to scholarship organizations supporting post-secondary workforce education, including trade schools and apprenticeship programs and K-12 education.
The national effort coincides with a successful statewide effort led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who earlier this month signed a bill into law creating Texas’ first Education Savings Account program, The Center Square reported.
After the Texas Senate previously passed a similar bill that went nowhere in the Texas House, Abbott helped elect new Republicans to the Texas House last year who followed through on their campaign pledge to vote for the bill. Texas’ new ESA program allocates $1 billion to fund $10,000 ESAs for roughly 100,000 students.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.