For the third Congress in a row, GOP lawmakers are pushing to strip the nation’s largest teachers’ union of its federal charter.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. and Reps. Mark Harris, R-N.C., Mary Miller, R-Ill., and Ralph Norman, R-S.C. on Wednesday introduced the latest proposal to revoke the National Education Association’s nearly 120-year-old charter.
The proposal probably faces long odds unless it get wrapped into a larger legislative vehicle; Congress spent most of the first part of 2025 in the bruising process of passing a budget reconciliation bill.
But the proposal echoes the Heritage Foundation’s conservative Project 2025 plan that has guided much of the Trump administration’s education policy, and it could find more traction in the current GOP-controlled Congress.
NEA President Becky Pringle tied the move to the administration’s aggressive—and largely successful—push for narrowing the federal role in education and promoting school choice.
“Rather than supporting students and educators, some anti-public education politicians are now introducing legislation to repeal the National Education Association charter because the billionaires that fund their campaigns don’t want educators to have a voice,” she said in a statement.
In 1906, Congress granted the NEA unique status among U.S. labor unions as a federally chartered corporation to “elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”
The repeal co-sponsors argued in a press briefing on the legislation that the union leans too far liberal in its positions, and donates the majority of its campaign contributions to Democratic over Republican candidates and causes.
“The NEA was created to champion America’s teachers and serve our schools, but it has spiraled into a partisan machine that’s more about radical ideology than education,” Rep. Harris said in a press conference Wednesday morning. “There’s zero justification for the United States Congress to continue giving them our stamp of approval.”
Prior repeal bills in the 117th and 118th Congresses died in House and Senate judicial committees in 2021-22 and 2023-24.
The same day as the bill introduction, the anti-union Freedom Foundation released a report calling for Congress to, among other things, bar the NEA from traditional labor union activities such as engaging in electoral politics, lobbying, or collecting dues, and require it to “actively intervene to prevent any strikes or work stoppages by its affiliates.”
Revoking the NEA’s charter would not, on its own, do any of those things. But Aaron Withe, chief executive officer of the Freedom Foundation, suggested that additional legislation would be introduced next week, “whether that be removing [the NEA charter] entirely, or stripping it, or changing how it operates.”
Republicans’ relationship with teachers’ unions is shifting
Although the relationship between the heavily Democratic NEA and the GOP has never been warm, Republican lawmakers as recently as 2015 teamed up with the union to shape elements of the rewrite of the main K-12 education law.
That collaboration has largely gone away as Trump-infused populism has taken ahold of the party.
The NEA made overtures to conservative teachers this year as part of broader organizing efforts, but the union’s charter has been in Republican crosshairs for years. Two prior GOP repeal efforts cited votes at prior NEA conventions on issues such as critical race theory and immigrant and LGBTQ+ student protections as evidence that the union promotes a “radical progressive agenda on America’s schools.”
The bulk of the NEA’s annual representative assembly concerns “new business items,” which require support from only 50 delegates to go to a vote. They range from the straightforward—such as compiling information on teacher safety laws—to more divisive proposals on how to respond to immigration raids in schools or the Trump administration’s attempts to dissolve the federal Education Department.
If approved, these proposals do not supersede the union’s bylaws or other priorities, and they go into effect for only a year, so they generally are considered a pulse-check of members’ stances on issues, rather than permanent NEA directives.
At this year’s representative assembly, delegates again approved measures supporting immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and teachers, and strongly critiqued President Donald Trump’s education policies.
Rep. Harris specifically chided NEA for “abandoning any fight against rampant anti-Semitism,” because convention delegates voted this year to recommend that the union no longer use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League, or participate in ADL programs or professional development.
That debate centered around whether the ADL’s materials and policies represented different Jewish groups. And the approved proposal must still be reviewed by the union’s executive committee and board of directors. (Some new business is never implemented, and measures that involve boycotts get close scrutiny.)
Groups including Moms for Liberty, a parent group focused on removing LGBTQ+ and race issues from school curricula, spoke out against the NEA at the Capitol on Wednesday morning, while in the afternoon around 400 educators from the Freedom Foundation-backed Teacher Freedom Alliance protested Wednesday in front of the NEA’s Washington headquarters, urging teachers to “opt out” of their local unions.
“We want [teachers] promoting traditional education values and bringing meritocracy back to our classrooms and bringing exceptionalism back to our classrooms,” Withe said.
NEA leaders and local affiliates sounded a defiant tone Wednesday afternoon.
“Let me be clear—public school educators will never stop advocating for our students and communities and the National Education Association will never stop lifting up the voice of those educators who dedicate their lives to the success of all of our students,” Pringle said.
