Famously, Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned from her job in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Like some in the Trump administration at the time, DeVos — whose tenure was condemned by the public education community due to her enthusiasm for privatization — made it clear that her resignation was fueled by her belief that Trump was responsible for the violent storming of the Capitol and called the attack “unconscionable for our country.”
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote in her letter of resignation on January 7, 2021, one day after the attack.
But, like many Republicans who condemned the attack and Trump’s role in inciting it, DeVos may be hoping Americans have the memory of a goldfish. With Trump as the Republican nominee in this year’s election, DeVos is stating publicly that she’d work for Trump again if he forgave her for that whole being-upset-about-the-insurrection thing — the kind of groveling that Trump is known to enjoy.
She has a few other conditions as well.
“I don’t think President Trump would ask me to again,” DeVos told The Detroit News in a story published over the weekend. “But if he did, I would want to do so only if it was with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education as we tried to do through budgetary process in the first administration. And also getting a commitment to passing a major education freedom bill in the form of a tax credit mechanism at the Department of Treasury.”
While DeVos did not provide details on what exactly she would hope to cut as part of the “phasing out” of the Education Department, slicing the department’s budget to reduce federal support for public schools was a pillar of DeVos’ Trump administration tenure. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the project — despite his allies’ fingerprints being all over it — a big picture goal for education in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” involves dramatic cuts to federal funding for America’s public schools. Project 2025 authors are focused specifically on scaling back long established federal precedents in education, like eliminating Title IX protections, according to Education Week.
Per their analysis:
While school funding is among the topics covered in the report, Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s education policy director, told Education Week earlier this year that a new conservative administration should immediately prioritize rewriting Title IX rules and reversing efforts to cancel student debt.
School districts receive about 10 percent of their funds from the government, with state and local sources supplying the lion’s share, so the proposals are necessarily limited in their reach. Still, the project would dramatically alter the federal footprint in education that began with the creation of Title I in 1965.
The exact consequences of these proposals are difficult for researchers to game out because they would reverse decades of precedent and create new opportunities for states and school districts to decide how to allocate resources. For instance, if Title I ends, some states might create their own programs to supply schools with extra resources for vulnerable students, while others might not.
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See, she really does have principles. And, if you don’t like them, she has others.
Thanks, Groucho.
Profile in Courage right there… sheesh
DeVos translated: “The guy disgusts me, but I’d go back to work for him if he’d just let me fulfill my RWNJ goals. Plus, he’d need to phase out my job quickly because I don’t really like to work and, besides, I’m rich and I don’t need to work.”
DeVos is a lousy traitor who wants a second bite at the sabotage apple. Her and her brother are scum of the earth.
The reason more rats aren’t fleeing the sinking USS Trump is that the fix is in for Trump all over the place. Will it be enough? Absolutely yes – the only question is whether they’ve rigged the places that matter this time. The answer to that is “probably yes,” but only probably.
GOP statehouses still have 3 months to drop their masks. I expect them to go all-in.