The U.S. House Is Voting on the SCORE Act This Week. Conservatives Are United Behind It.

The U.S. House is set to vote this week on H.R. 4312, the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act. This is a chance to bring clarity and common sense to name, image, and likeness rules in college sports, an area that has become chaotic and inconsistent without a national framework.

Center for a Free Economy organized a coalition letter urging House leadership to pass the SCORE Act. Many conservative groups joined because student-athletes need predictable rules, not a confusing mix of state laws or new layers of federal control.

The need for action stems from the Supreme Court’s NCAA v. Alston decision in 2021. Since then, states have rushed to create their own NIL laws. The result is confusion for families, students, schools, and athletic conferences. H.R. 4312 replaces this patchwork with a single national standard that protects individual choice and keeps government limits in check.

The SCORE Act also prevents trial lawyers from turning college sports into a new field for lawsuits. It keeps student-athletes from being reclassified as university employees, which would force many of them into unions. The bill allows student-athletes to be treated as the small business owners they become when they earn NIL income. This approach protects opportunity and avoids unnecessary regulation.

The alternative is the SAFE Act. That proposal invites litigation, pushes student-athletes toward mandatory unionization, and creates a national government board to negotiate media contracts for every school. Washington bureaucrats should not be negotiating television rights for college sports.

Thirty-one Division I athletic conferences support the SCORE Act. That group includes schools with small budgets and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A wide range of conservative organizations also signed the coalition letter that Center for a Free Economy led, including National Taxpayers Union, Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Commitment, and others.

The U.S. House has a clear choice this week. It can pass H.R. 4312 and provide a stable, constitutional, pro-freedom framework for NIL. The SCORE Act is the right way to bring order to a system that has drifted without clear rules, and the time to act is now.

Read the full letter here:

SCORE Act Letter.pdf

Download PDF • 332KB