Jeers were not likely to stop DeVos. Even as she became a bête noire for the left, she appointed an ever-growing number of deputies who shared her ideologically retrograde vision of education. More than any other cabinet member, DeVos demonstrated how perfectly bumbling but ultimately destructive the Trump administration could be.
Most of all, they wanted to undo what Obama had done. The right had taken issue with a number of Obama directives on education: his prosecution of for-profit colleges, his protections for transgender students, his insistence that colleges take students’ allegations of sexual assault more seriously. As with so many other aspects of public policy, Republicans depicted Obama as moving too quickly, too far to the left for a country they insisted remained to the right of center.
Trump was so attractive because he promised to undo all that with chainsaw and sledgehammer. During the presidential campaign, he even promised to drastically diminish the Department of Education altogether. Most observers dismissed this as an unserious idea by an unserious candidate, an idea that did not need to be discussed because the man who came up with that idea was never going to be president. But in the summer of 2018, Trump proposed a plan to merge the departments of Education and Labor, curtailing the reach of both (that plan’s prospects remained unclear as of early 2019).
DeVos did not have a tendency to graft the way Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke did. Nor did she treat herself to crass displays of self-importance. She didn’t turn the department into a Blackwater headquarters, either. Instead, she went quietly about her work.
DeVos selected deputies—at unmistakable direction from conservative think tanks and the for-profit education industry—who showed open disdain for the Education Department and everything that it had most recently stood for. Some were culture warriors and some were profiteers. Few showed interest in using education as a means of helping the neglected communities that elected Trump, communities where education had atrophied beyond recognition.
Carlos G. Muñiz had worked in the office of Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, an unapologetic partisan who saw her office as little more than a stage for her coming-out as a Republican star. In 2013, New York State sued Trump’s real estate seminar business, Trump University, for fraudulent practices, charging that students promised trade secrets were given low-quality instruction. Bondi could have joined the suit, but declined to do so. Right around that time, Trump’s foundation contributed $25,000 to her reelection efforts (Bondi would steadfastly maintain the two events were utterly unrelated).
Muñiz schemed with Bondi about how to defend the decision not to join the Trump University suit. Later, he went on to represent Florida State University, which was being sued by a female student who had credibly claimed that star quarterback Jameis Winston raped her after a night of drinking in 2012. Investigation into the Winston case revealed a culture in which football players were treated like gods, while sexual assault allegations were frequently diminished or dismissed. The case had been one of several that spurred Obama to make the issue of college sexual assault a priority for his Justice Department. It was a priority for Muñiz too, but only because of the hours he was able to bill as he and his co-counselors mounted a fantastical defense of a university corrupted by football.
In early 2016, Florida State settled with Winston’s accuser for $950,000. A little more than a year later, Muñiz was made the top lawyer in the Education Department.
To head the Civil Rights Office, DeVos picked Candice E. Jackson, a smart young conservative activist. She had transferred from a Southern California community college to Stanford, where she wrote for the Stanford Review, the conservative publication cofounded by technology entrepreneur (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel. Her articles included criticism of affirmative action, which Stanford and many other universities used to redress legacies of discrimination; Jackson said that the push for diversity resulted in discrimination of its own. In 2005, she published a book, Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine, about the women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. She also wrote Christian music.
Democrats were alarmed by Jackson’s appointment. They were right to be. Several months after she joined the department, Jackson issued a directive mandating that investigations be conducted more quickly, with less energy devoted to trying to discover broader patterns of discrimination. She also told the New York Times that 90 percent of all sexual assault complaints on college campuses “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk.’” Jackson apologized for the preposterous assertion, but that did little to dispel suspicion about her aims.
DeVos did make a few surprising hires, including an unapologetic Democrat as a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and a former teacher of migrant workers in North Carolina to head the Office of English Language Acquisition. But she also struggled to fill the top ranks of her department, more so than any of her peers in the Trump cabinet. Nine months into the Trump administration, the Department of Education could boast “the highest vacancy rate of any Cabinet-level agency,” according to education news site The 74, “with 12 of 15 positions open for which the White House has not announced a nominee or the Senate confirmed an officer.” The situation did improve throughout 2018, so that by early 2019, 63 percent of the top positions in the department were filled. Still, it was a dismal place: in fact, the worst midsized federal agency at which to work, five notches below the Pruitt-ravaged EPA, according to a survey of federal employees conducted by the Partnership for Public Service late that year.
Governing by neglect was a trait DeVos shared with Trump. She said so herself, in a Republican summit in September 2017: “President Trump and I know our jobs: It’s to get out of the way.” There were other similarities, including an almost pathological inability to appreciate the experiences of others. Like the president, she saw lived experiences different from her own as a threat, because it might put into question what she’d always believed. So she praised historically black colleges, which arose during the era of lawful segregation, for being “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” The world had to conform to her worldview, not the other way around.
And despite her long-held Christian values, DeVos evidently regarded education as a Darwinian landscape, where the strong were to dominate the weak. Any barrier to that dominion had to be removed, so that the natural course of events could take place. School would be a place not for nurturing excellence but asserting brute superiority. Hers was an acutely heartless conservatism, made all the more so because it was applied to children and young people.
By the time the consequences of the financial and housing crises receded somewhat, many Americans realized that an even more perilous class of debt than subprime mortgages was threatening the nation: college loans. College was becoming more expensive, while wages remained flat, leading more families to borrow for higher education. As a result, student debt reached $1.5 trillion by mid-2018. President Obama and his wife, Michelle, understood this problem from personal experience: between Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard Law, the Obamas owed a total of $120,000, which they did not fully pay off until 2004.
Obama instituted a loan forgiveness program, Pay As You Earn, that capped student loan payments for struggling young Americans to 10 percent of their income, and forgave those loans altogether after twenty years of diligent payment. He also greatly expanded the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, under which a loan could be forgiven in ten years, provided that the borrower was engaged in a socially beneficent career like teaching.
Most important, the Obama administration offered debt relief to students at for-profit colleges, who were routinely exploited by institutions that promised to vault them into the middle class. A full 88 percent of students at for-profit colleges carried student loans. They owed an average of $39,950, about $7,000 more than at nonprofit private colleges and a full $14,000 more than at public universities, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. After Corinthian
Colleges, a group of ineffective, poorly run for-profit institutions, collapsed in 2014, the Obama administration offered debt relief to its 350,000 students, an initiative that at its upper bound could end up costing $3.5 billion.
A week before the 2016 presidential election, the Obama administration published a new “borrower defense rule,” which would allow students not to repay loans from what Education Secretary John B. King Jr. called “dodgy schools,” a clear reference to for-profits. If students could show that a school had engaged in deceptive marketing or was responsible for poor educational outcomes—Corinthian appeared to have been guilty of both—they could have their loans forgiven.
DeVos made clear from the start that for-profit colleges finally had a friend in the federal government. The transition beachhead team included Taylor Hansen, a for-profit college lobbyist who would briefly work with DeVos’s staff to weaken the Obama rules. Robert S. Eitel, who was also on the beachhead team, had been the chief counsel for Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit education company facing federal investigation. He became a top DeVos deputy.
To head the unit investigating for-profit colleges, DeVos hired Julian Schmoke Jr., who was previously a dean at DeVry University, a notorious operator in the industry that had paid a $100 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission. The move was akin to tasking Al Capone to investigate organized crime. In May 2018, the investigative unit was eliminated altogether as a result of Eitel’s efforts.
DeVos raised from the dead the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, a body that had been eliminated by Obama after it became clear that it had sanctioned the corrupt behavior of Corinthian and other unscrupulous for-profit operators. DeVos temporarily reinstated the council despite the objections of Department of Education staff, which wrote her a 244-page report advising against the move.
She also delayed (and vowed to replace) Obama’s borrower defense rule, explaining in the fall of 2017: “Under the previous rules, all one had to do was raise his or her hands to be entitled to so-called free money.” But in October 2018, a judge ordered DeVos to stop stalling and implement the Obama rule. DeVos was still planning to write a rule of her own, one that would be a lot kinder to for-profit colleges and a lot less kind to the students they cheated.
DeVos also moved to eliminate the gainful employment rule, with which the Obama administration forced for-profit colleges and job-training programs to show that their students were trained to get jobs that would allow them to pay down loans. In the summer of 2018, DeVos indicated that she was going to rewrite the rule, but then fall came and there was nothing. That meant the Obama rule would stay until at least 2020.
On social matters, DeVos failed to show anything resembling compassion. Under the Obama administration, the Education Department moved to toughen the way schools dealt with sexual assault allegations; in the spring of 2011, the department issued a guidance that told schools to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine whether sexual misconduct had occurred. This was a lower standard than the “clear and convincing” bar that schools had been using until that time. The change would help accusers, who were becoming increasingly vocal about how prevalent rape had become on the American college campus. Sexual assault survivors found a champion on Capitol Hill in New York’s junior senator, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a Democrat, while the 2015 documentary film The Hunting Ground poignantly dramatized their plight. Pained and angry, the voices of college rape survivors were precursors to the #MeToo movement.
The Trump administration was no friend of #MeToo or its affiliated causes. In September 2017, DeVos made perhaps her most widely criticized move to date, rescinding the 2011 guidance, declaring that “the era of rule by letter is over,” a suspect assertion given that the Trump administration was governing almost entirely by executive order, despite having control of both chambers of Congress. DeVos issued a directive of her own, one that counseled schools to raise the bar once more for what constituted a viable complaint: “When a school applies special procedures in sexual misconduct cases, it suggests a discriminatory purpose and should be avoided.” The guidance also counseled schools to respect students’ “free speech” rights, a favorite shibboleth of conservative campus activists.
So it went with the guidance Obama issued on transgender students. That guidance, from 2016, declared that “a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity.” Most coverage of the issue focused on the part of the guidance dealing with locker rooms and bathrooms: “A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex,” the directive said, “but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity.”
DeVos did away with these. Her own guidance, issued jointly with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in February 2017, said that “there must be due regard for the primary role of the States and local school districts in establishing educational policy” (in fairness to DeVos, it was Sessions who pushed for the guidance, while DeVos initially opposed the move). The appeal to states’ rights was rooted in the segregated South’s antipathy to integrating its school. Back then, too, the American government was accused of getting ahead of the American people.
As time went on, DeVos showed no sign of lessons learned, of compassion developed. In the spring of 2018, DeVos was asked during a House hearing by a congressman from upper Manhattan if she felt that school officials should report undocumented students to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. There were many such students in New York and in large cities around the nation. If they feared ICE, they might stop coming to school. And if their children couldn’t receive an education, why would parents stay in America?
DeVos answered that calling ICE should be “a school decision,” betraying her ignorance of educational policy, as well as of legal precedent. A 1982 ruling by the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe said it was wrong to “deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders,” which was subsequently interpreted to include immigration enforcement. The exchange was instructive only because it showed how little DeVos had learned, how much she failed to understand after two years as the nation’s top education official. At a later hearing, she admitted in an exchange with Senator Murphy, he of “potential grizzlies” fame, that ICE could not enter a school.
Other than dismantling President Obama’s legacy on education, how much of her own agenda had DeVos fulfilled? Not much, judging by how little progress she made on her signature issue of school choice. Trump had promised to devote $20 billion to such an initiative, just as he had promised that Mexico would pay for a border wall. It didn’t help that DeVos had made few friends on Capitol Hill. Then there was the certain unruliness of a program potentially affecting all 98,300 of the country’s public schools, and a check from Mexico for a border barrier started to seem more likely.
By the end of 2018, DeVos was reduced to a pathetic cheerleader for pointless causes. One had to do with allowing states to access federal grants to fund the arming of school employees. Out there, somewhere in the darkness, potential grizzlies roamed.
Conclusion: Some People
Once they wanted the best people. But now, two years into the Trump administration, they would take just about anyone. Having promised to drastically reduce the size of the federal government, perhaps by eliminating some agencies altogether, Trump discovered that even limited government needed legions of workers to carry out its functions. And so, with many federal agencies severely understaffed, in June 2018, the White House turned to a job fair.
Announcement of the job fair, which was to be hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, was met with predictable glee. A functional White House shouldn’t have needed a job fair, especially not this late into a presidential term. For critics of the administration, this was further proof that Trump was nothing like the capable chief executive portrayed o
n The Apprentice.
For job-seekers, however, this was an opportunity for advancement, perhaps a significant one given how many positions within the executive branch remained unfilled. The people who packed the Dirksen Senate Office Building on a hot Friday afternoon represented the cross-section of what U.S. government service looks like: an elderly gentleman in an African-style kente-cloth hat, a young white guy in a white “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. Waiting for them behind rows of tables were mostly young employees of a number of government agencies, from the Office of Presidential Personnel to the Peace Corps. They took résumés and chatted briefly with the applicants.
Given the rushed, unfiltered quality of the interactions, things could turn awkward, as when a woman at the Small Business Administration desk asked an applicant about his “background.”
“You mean racial?” he wondered. The woman hastened to explain that she only wanted to know where he had worked.
Some tables offered swag, pencils from the Interior Department being perhaps the most attractive offering. At an Environmental Protection Agency desk, you could pick up a pamphlet titled 500 Days of American Greatness, a final attempt by Pruitt (then just weeks away from dismissal) to ingratiate himself with Trump.
A woman at the White House Internship Program explained how “extraordinarily” competitive the application process was. Well, unless the EPA’s Pruitt happened to be your father: earlier that day, the New York Times reported that Pruitt had leveraged the power of his office to seek a White House internship for his daughter McKenna.
Speaking from a podium, a staffer for Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, praised the throng of job-seekers before him. “Most people in this town care only about their careers,” he said. “I’m really encouraged to look around the room and see people who care about America, freedom, and”—here his voice took on a tenuous, interrogative tone, as if he wasn’t entirely sure himself and needed his audience’s affirmation—“making America great again?”
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