Betsy DeVos has become accustomed to hostile audiences. The House of Representatives’ education committee earlier this month was no exception.

“When you approach a public school, you are protested,” the Democratic congresswoman Frederica Wilson told the education secretary. “When you enter, you are booed. You are the most unpopular person in our government. Millions will register to vote in 2020. Many will vote to remove you more than to remove the president.”

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It was a rare moment of clarity in the constant swirl of drama in Washington – border wall, Russia, partisan warfare, media bashing, tweets, impeachment – that seems to provide cover for Donald Trump’s cabinet secretaries to escape scrutiny. Chief among them is DeVos who, critics say, is quietly and insidiously destroying public education in America.

DeVos’s record is proof, they argue, that when the smoke of the Trump presidency finally clears, the substance of his legacy on policy, deregulation and stacking the courts will remain – and take far longer to repair.

“We’ve had plenty of Republican as well as Democratic secretaries of education but none of them, even those who believed in alternatives to public education, actually tried to eviscerate public education,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Here is someone who in her first budget tried to eliminate every single summer school programme, every single after-school programme, and who has done everything in her power to try to make it harder for us to strengthen public [sector] schools.”

A billionaire philanthropist, DeVos, 61, attended a private Christian school in Michigan and sent most of her children to private Christian schools; she has had little exposure to public education. She became a champion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and vouchers that enable families to take tax dollars from the public education system to the private sector.

Since taking office, she has proposed billions of dollars in cuts to her own department, hitting class size reductions, after-school programmes, full-service community schools and student loan forgiveness. Even Trump overruled her on plans to gut the Special Olympics, and she has recently run into opposition from the Democratic-controlled House, which passed significant budget increases.

Weingarten commented: “Here you have someone whose job it is to help students, 90% of whom go to public schools in America, and to help students in higher education navigate through their student debt or try to mitigate it. She’s failed on both accounts. Instead, she’s tried to defund and dismantle public education and make it harder for us to help kids in public education.”

DeVos is currently attacking a programme, known as “borrower defense to repayment”, intended to forgive federal loans for students whose colleges misrepresent the quality of their education or otherwise commit fraud. The programme was expanded under Barack Obama but DeVos has been accused of stalling it for more than a year while she altered the rules and made it harder for students to get loan relief, resulting in a large backlog.

Last month, a federal judge held DeVos in contempt for violating an order to stop collecting loan payments from former Corinthian Colleges students, a for-profit college chain that collapsed in 2015 amid allegations that it lied about the success of its graduates in order to get students to enroll.

Weingarten commented: “I’m not surprised that a judge held her in contempt because, just like her boss, she mocks the rule of law. Her rule is: she’s rich and she’s a believer in her ideology and that should drive it, not her oath of office, not that this is democracy, not that she is the secretary of education. So the mood [among teachers] is: we told you so, we knew she’d be like this.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters against Betsy DeVos in 2017. Photograph: Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

In addition, the 11th education secretary is seeking to spin off the Federal Student Aid office – which provides more than $150bn a year in federal grants, loans and work-study funds to college students – into a new agency. She says the office is an “untamed beast” in “distress”; critics regard the proposal as a waste of time and resources.

The long charge sheet against DeVos also includes the withdrawal of federal guidance, developed under the Obama administration, that spelled out protections for transgender students under title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.

DeVos has also proposed a requirement that colleges allow cross-examination of sexual assault and harassment accusers. Activists argue this would discourage victims from coming forward. Former vice-president Joe Biden has promised to reverse the guidance if he becomes president.

Weingarten said: “She’s unwound any number of protections that kids have in education because the Department of Education is supposed to be the civil rights agency for children. And when it comes to higher education, she really has betrayed the aspirations of kids who need and have student loans in order to make their aspirations real in postsecondary education.”

DeVos’s job appears safe as long as Trumpis president. But she has been sharply criticised by Democratic 2020 candidates, including moderates. Pete Buttigieg has vowed that, should he reach the White House, he would appoint a secretary who actually believes in public education. Senator Amy Klobuchar has promised to fire DeVos immediately.

John Delaney, the first Democrat to jump into the race, joined the condemnation. “If we were grading her on a report card, I would give her very low grades if not a failing grade,” he said by phone from Iowa. “The reason I think she has not been a successful secretary of education was obvious from the day she was given the job, which is she doesn’t believe in the public education system in this country. She would voucherise the whole system if she could.”

But for now, DeVos and other cabinet secretaries seem relatively safe from the spotlight as Trump’s flame-throwing, attention-grabbing antics intensify. Delaney warned: “We have to be careful not to be so preoccupied with every single ridiculous thing the president does because, to some extent, it might be a strategy to distract us from the bad policy that’s actually getting done. Obviously the things he did with Ukraine deserve this attention they’re getting. But in some ways he’s the bright, shiny light and every little tweet causes people to just be incredibly preoccupied.

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“Meanwhile, environmental regulations are getting rolled back. Ethanol waivers are being granted. There are proposals to spin off the entire student loan portfolio of the Department of Education. The list goes on and on and on of real policies that are happening that deserve much more attention. She has largely kept her head down and gone about her business, which I think is ideologically driven and hasn’t attracted that much attention.”

DeVos – whose brother, Erik Prince, is the founder of Blackwater, a private security contractor notorious for its operations in Iraq – is the former chair of the Michigan Republican party. Critics say she used her wealth to push legislators to defund public education in favour of for-profit charter schools in the state, and students’ test results have suffered badly as a consequence.

Neil Sroka, a progressive activist based in Detroit, Michigan, said: “In the state of Michigan, ‘DeVos’ is a one-word epithet for everything broken in our education system. Michigan was a Petri dish and the future is now. DeVos pushed her policies on state schools and the chickens have come home to roost in Michigan.”

Sroka, spokesman for the political action committee Democracy for America, added: “It’s hard to say in administration like Donald Trump’s who the biggest villain is. The Trump administration has been a rogues’ gallery but Betsy DeVos, from the sheer lack of expertise to her defence of rapists and attempted rapists to her attack on any effort for students to throw off the yoke of student debt in their lifetime, ticks all the boxes.

“The scion of wealth and privilege has never had a real job but made it her life’s work to attack public schools, teachers and students. She only escapes scrutiny because so much incompetence, grief and evil comes out of this administration that she’s been able to ride out the storm. But she’s made it much more likely we’ll get a Democratic education secretary who’s a real champion for teachers.”

The Department of Education did not respond to requests for an interview with DeVos.