Four especially testy moments when Betsy DeVos testified on Capitol Hill
It was one of a handful of testy moments during DeVos’s appearance before the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee for Labor, Health, Human Services, Education and Related Agencies where she defended the Trump administration’s proposed 2021 Education Department budget.
She did make some news: During the hearing, DeVos announced she had set up a task force headed by Mitchell “Mick” Zais, her top deputy, to oversee the department’s response to the spreading coronavirus. And she said she had opened an investigation into a college that appears to have no faculty or students but was approved to operate by a controversial accrediting agency still in business after DeVos saved it in 2018. USA Today reported on the school, Reagan National University, and DeVos said Thursday she was “not happy to read the story” and had ordered a probe. “We’re on it,” she said.
Those announcements were not what sparked fireworks.
DeVos took questions about the proposed budget, which would cut the department’s discretionary spending by 7.8 percent. It would also lump nearly 30 elementary and secondary education programs — including support for homeless students, civics education and charter schools — into a single $19 billion block grant for states and local districts to use as they want.
The administration’s top education priority, which appears in the Treasury Department’s proposed budget as a line item, is $5 billion to give tax breaks for a program called the Education Freedom CONTINUE READING: Four especially testy moments when Betsy DeVos testified on Capitol Hill - The Washington Post