There have been strong recent entries in the competition for Worst Cabinet Member in the current administration but I maintain that installing a know-nothing like Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education remains the most singularly contemptuous hiring of them all. Not only is DeVos profoundly ignorant of the actual activity over which the department she heads is tasked to administer, she holds its public-sector schools in ignorant contempt.

(As recently as last March, DeVos stumbled through an embarrassing interview on 60 Minutes. All we really learned is that the only thing Betsy DeVos knows about educating children is how to make a buck out of it.)

She's also deeply in the pocket of the student-loan industry, as evidenced by the fact that she's just about abandoned efforts to police that industry's shadier elements. From CNN:



Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and Washington, DC, sent a letter to the secretary last week saying the Department of Education is blocking access to records requested by law enforcement.

"The department's policy reversal impedes states' ability to enforce the law and shields unprincipled industry actors from regulatory enforcement, harming student loan borrowers nationwide," the letter reads. The department has cited privacy reasons when rejecting requests for information over the past year, the attorneys general wrote.

The Department of Education argues that it's best for the federal government to monitor the system -- a departure from DeVos' stance about state power on other education issues. She's argued that it should be left up to the states to decide whether teachers have guns in the classroom and to set discrimination rules for private schools that receive public funding.



Yeah, no kidding. Republicans are insincere about their argument that states handle things better than the federal government? Unpossible!



DeVos has been up on Capitol Hill for a couple of days being roasted by Democratic legislators about all the issues stemming from her fundamental incompetence. (And they are legion.) On Thursday, before the House Committee on Education and Labor, she ran into Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio. DeVos was shilling for her latest brainstorm—so-called "Freedom Scholarships," by which public money (through a one dollar-to-one dollar tax credit) would finance "school choice" scholarships, allegedly for handicapped and impoverished students.

DeVos imparts some of her vast knowledge to the president. The Washington Post Getty Images

Unfortunately, and predictably, these are vouchers in sheep's clothing, a Trojan horse through which public investment would be used to pay for enrollment in private, as well as sectarian religious, schools. Fudge was having none of this, well, fudging.



Fudge: “Do you realize that it is your responsibility to educate every child in the United States?”

DeVos: “It’s my responsibility to be the Secretary of Education,."

Fudge: “It’s just a yes or no. Is that a yes or is that a no?”

Receiving no answer to a fairly elementary question, Fudge proceeded to dismantle DeVos's proposal for the sham that it is.

“My concern is that you spend so much of your time focused on vouchers, how do we fund religious and private schools. And then you come up with something called the Education Freedom Scholarship, which by any other name is a voucher. We are, once again, picking winners and losers. We have already decided that we’re going to make rich people richer with the tax cuts, we’re going to make poor people about the same. Middle class, we’re going to hurt with more taxes.” If you give a one-to-one tax credit for [private school exemptions], it’s going to create a $5 billion hole in the Federal Treasury. That’s $5 billion that could be spent on education and other things.”

“This freedom is going to cost us $5 billion a year, $50 billion over 10 years. There is a cost to everything we do. Yours just happens to be $50 billion to the Treasury. I just wish at some point we would be honest with what we are doing. And we would just tell the American people is that what we’re doing with this is we’re creating a shell game to fund private and religious schools and their providers using taxpayers as the middle man. It is nothing more than another attempt to dis-invest in public education. And that is why I asked you the first question, which you couldn’t even answer: Do you represent all of the children of the United States? Is it not your job to educate all of the children? It wasn’t a trick question.”

I don't care what Barr does, or how enthusiastically Mike Pompeo stans for war with Iran. Betsy DeVos wins the House Cup in this category. Thank god elections still have consequences.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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