Vance Introduces College Endowment Accountability Act: 35% Excise Tax on Large University Endowments

On December 14, 2023, then-Senator JD Vance introduced the College Endowment Accountability Act, seeking unanimous consent to pass the legislation on the Senate floor. The bill would have raised the excise tax on endowment net investment income from 1.4% to 35% for private colleges and universities with at least $10 billion in endowment assets. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) objected, blocking passage.

Bill Provisions

The bill targeted the largest university endowments — primarily Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford — which Vance argued used tax-exempt wealth to “push DEI and woke insanity” while burdening students with over $1 trillion in collective debt. The 35% rate would have been punitive at scale: at that rate, Harvard alone would have owed approximately $1.79 billion annually in taxes, representing roughly 27.9% of its annual operating revenue.

No co-sponsors. Never received a committee hearing in the 118th Congress.

Significance: Predecessor to OBBBA Endowment Tax

This bill is the documented intellectual origin of the 8% tiered endowment tax enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA, Public Law 119-21, July 4, 2025). The OBBBA version reduced the rate from 35% to 8% and adjusted the asset threshold, but the structural mechanism — an excise tax on net investment income for large university endowments — originated in Vance’s December 2023 Senate bill.

See 2025-07-01–vance-tiebreaker-obbba: Vance cast the tiebreaking Senate vote enacting this provision 19 months after introducing it. He is the named co-architect of the policy, not merely a ratifier.

The vance-project-2025-alignment-audit notes this as the one Project 2025 Chapter 6 (Education, Lindsey Burke framework) provision where Vance is documented as the policy originator: “His December 2023 endowment-tax bill is the proximate predecessor of the OBBBA’s higher-ed-tax provision.”