By: Alex Kotch
Preparing for a packed first week of confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s numerous controversial cabinet picks, Democratic politicians and advocacy groups had to decide which nominees they would focus their energy on opposing. With so many distasteful characters, several of whom have attacked the very agencies they’ve been nominated to lead, opposing all of them could spread resources too thin. Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, is clearly one of the worst.
DeVos, chairman of an investment firm and wife of the heir to the Amway fortune, has spent the last few decades advocating and funding the school privatization movement. Her nomination to lead public education may seem curious, as DeVos has never worked in public education and supports diverting public funds to pay for kids to attend private, religious schools. But considering Trump’s own eagerness to spend federal money on charter and private schools and DeVos and her family’s generous political donations to the GOP, the decision isn’t so curious after all.
DeVos’ first Senate confirmation hearing was set for January11, but her ethics review has not yet concluded and her financial disclosures are not public. The New York Times Editorial Board called her finances “a tangle that could take weeks to investigate,” as she and her husband have investments in 250 companies registered to the same Grand Rapids, Mich. address.
The Senate delayed her hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee until January 17, with its chair claiming the delay was “simply to accommodate the Senate schedule.” The committee will vote on her confirmation January 24.
Advocacy groups, Democratic politicians and ethics experts have shot up red flags in recent days, strongly opposing DeVos’ nomination.
Possible financial conflicts of interest
Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics lawyers who were recently named to lead the board of government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, explain why DeVos’ hearing should not occur until all of her ethics and financial documents have been vetted and made public.
“Shortchanging the ethics review process in Congress jeopardizes nominees’ ability to do their jobs if confirmed. The Senate, and all of us, need to know if nominees will, for example, sell investments that create conflicts. If not, will they recuse themselves from certain issues? Will they have so many recusals that they cannot reasonably perform their duties, or will they be running the constant risk of violating the anti-conflicts laws?”
DeVos is invested in a Michigan charter school, per Politico, and the Wall Street Journal exposed her indirect investment in an online student lending company. She was, and possibly still is invested in for-profit online charter school company K12, Inc.
“The notion that DeVos will be questioned before entering into an ethics agreement and disclosing it along with her financial holdings is absurd,” write Eisen and Painter.
The Office of Government Ethics has not completed DeVos’ ethics agreement, and her financial disclosure documents are nowhere to be found. Several other nominees are in the same boat, but Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who requested that Obama’s 2009 nominees complete both before Senate hearings—scheduled many of their hearings anyway. OGE director Walter Schaub expressed his concern over Senate hearings on nominees who haven’t completed the ethics review process. The hurried and incomplete process “has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings,” he wrote in a letter to two Democratic senators, adding that he was unaware of any instance like this since the OGE was created.
Unpaid campaign finance fines
Senate Democrats have asked DeVos to explain why her political group failed to pay a $5.3 million fine for breaking campaign finance laws in Ohio. In 2008, the pro-school choice All Children Matter illegally funneled $870,000 to its Ohio affiliate when that state’s yearly cap on donations was $10,000. The group reportedly asked the state about contribution limits, was told what they were, and then proceeded to donate 87 times the maximum legal amount.
DeVos played a role in the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which has allowed unlimited individual, corporate and union money into elections. EdSource’s Louis Freedberg describes how DeVos was a founding board member of an institute set on ending restrictions on money in politics that hired attorney James Bopp as its chief counsel. Bopp would go on to successfully argue the Citizens United case.
Few issues have been “more central to the DeVos family’s mission than eradicating restraints on political spending,” wrote New Yorker investigative journalist Jane Mayer in her book, Dark Money.