The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC) is a watershed piece of legislation poised to permanently reshape school funding across education sectors, including public schools. But the law is confusing and convoluted and carries new requirements for states, and governors are under a tight clock to opt in or out of participating.

So what does the Treasury Department, the agency charged with writing the rules that will govern the tax credit, do? It swallows up 15 months before finalizing one set of regulations, issuing another incomplete proposed set (the public comment period remains open), and making a pledge (read: warning) to release critical guidance on allowable expenses that will come too late to influence governors’ decisions. Treasury offers no informational webinars, no technical assistance, and no direct engagement with the field, save for a small invite-only session back in June.

What a mess.

So here we are. It’s two months before the FSTC launches, and five Democratic governors have now asked in writing for answers to guide their opt-in decisions. I have no confidence that Treasury will get them the information they need.

Yet the governors’ questions deserve answers. Some of those answers already exist in a close read of the fine print, some can be anticipated based on constraints on what Treasury can accomplish in guidance, and some will remain unknowable until after the deadline to opt in.

Here’s a breakdown:

Qualified expenses for public school students. The governors want more specificity about what services qualify as eligible expenses.

What we know: Treasury has little authority to limit qualified expenses for public schools. Who knows what Treasury’s guidance will say, but it will be “guidance” that can’t be legally enforced. If Treasury tries to narrow the scope for public schools, there’d be good reason to ignore it, because the law gives public and private schools the same standing. If private schools can accept scholarship tuition, then any expense paid for by tuition should be fair game in public schools. Coverage for field trips, extracurriculars, or access to what I’ve called a “bundle of services” can work.

An exception is special education, where federal law dictates that all the services a child receives must be provided for “free.”

The bigger limitation will be each state’s own laws on what public schools must provide for free. California has particularly strict laws against charging students for extra-curriculars and other add-ons, but most other states have plenty of non-mandatory services that could be covered (including mental health supports, assemblies, tutoring, advising, and the like).

State oversight of Scholarship Granting Organizations. The governors perceive the limits Treasury has placed on state oversight of SGOs as at odds with the law’s requirement that states determine whether organizations qualify to operate as SGOs within their borders.

What we know: States can’t officially regulate SGOs, but there are other options. States want to track scholarship money—Is it equitable? How much is going to public schools?—and had hoped they could require SGOs to report on it. The draft regs make it clear they can’t.

But there are two possible workarounds. The first is to pass a state law requiring all schools and organizations that receive funds from an SGO to report those receipts. Instead of tracking the funds as SGOs disburse them, the state would track the funds as they arrive in the coffers of schools and organizations. It’s onerous but doable.

The second is to use state leverage to get SGOs to report their disbursements voluntarily. States can back SGOs that agree to share this information (by giving them airtime with superintendent associations, including them in official communications, etc.). They could call on employers to feature only cooperating SGOs in payroll deduction plans designed to make contributing frictionless.

Ability to use funding to close opportunity gaps. The governors question Treasury’s restrictions on states’ ability to require SGOs to adopt narrower eligibility standards than those specified in the law.

What we know: State leverage could also help drive progress on opportunity gaps. The five governors are unapologetically focused on public school students. It’s clear that Treasury doesn’t share that focus. But by putting states in charge of opting in, the law does give states a real role. A state could commit to staying in the program only if FSTC drives progress for higher-needs students. That would put the burden on SGOs to make that happen.

More immediately, state leaders could unofficially partner with a trusted SGO that commits to sending a fixed share of its funds to students at the highest poverty public schools. Here again, state backing would go a long way for an SGO.

Associated costs for overseeing compliance. The governors note the absence of any mention of oversight costs in Treasury’s proposed regulations and pointedly asked if federal funds are available to states that opt in to the FSTC program to offset those costs.

What we know: The bigger cost for states will be ensuring that public schools benefit. Where states hope to tap this program to drive funds to public schools or their students, there is a lot of work to do. None of this happens by itself. Even wielding the leverage of state authority takes work. But the bigger effort is the public information campaign needed to get taxpayers to participate in a way that benefits public schools the most. District leaders (who so far know very little about this program) will need reasons to trust it. The state’s largest employers and payroll systems like ADP will need to ensure that employees have mechanisms in place to contribute $1,700 and implement changes to federal withholding. And the state’s public school SGO will need to get the word out.

There will be smaller costs to states associated with monitoring compliance (although the bulk of the work of rooting out fraud falls more on the audit firms and the IRS). There are also ways FSTC could consume time, including the bandwidth needed to submit public comment (we suggest they do so on the topic of safeguarding student data).

Where do the resources come from for all this? Not from the feds. States would have to commit real time to unlock the larger sums for their public schools. It’s not nothing. Maybe philanthropy would help?

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The bottom line is that there’s no guarantee against unintended consequences when it comes to a program of this scope and novelty.  FSTC is unlike anything else the federal government has done in K–12 education. Odds aren’t good that Treasury will offer more clarity before year’s end. There are legitimate concerns about possible fraud and impacts on public school enrollment.

Yet, states should be aware there is the clear potential for financial upside for their public school districts. We have estimated $1,000 per public school student when the program is up and running, including $200 per student just from school district employees.

And what if states wait a year to opt in? Will it be hard to get taxpayers to redirect their contributions once elections are made?

For those governors that have hesitations but opt in anyway, a smart move would be to establish clear criteria under which their state will stay in the following year. One of those criteria might be that school districts and the students they serve see a clear benefit from the program.

Marguerite Roza is director of Edunomics Lab and research professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School, where she leads the Certificate in Education Finance.