DeVos Damage Assessment & Political Impact for GOP

Ryan Grim ( ) offers political analysis on the historic vote to confirm billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, and takes questions from 20K viewers who watched live on Facebook ().

This is part 2 of 2. After doing this live report, Grim wrote with Huffington Post education editor Rebecca Klein:

When it comes to implementing her agenda for public education, however, the battles have only started.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who backed DeVos and is a major proponent of the voucher movement, told reporters after Tuesday’s vote that there isn’t much she can do on her own. Over 90 percent of funding for schools comes from state and local resources, he noted, so the federal government controls only a small slice of education spending.

DeVos has long championed voucher programs that allow kids to attend private schools using taxpayer money, even though those schools are often religious. Her new boss, President Donald Trump, has made the expansion of voucher programs his signature education plan, proposing to repurpose $20 billion in existing federal funds to help subsidize students going to private schools.

Asked what DeVos’ confirmation means for that $20 billion proposal, Scott said not much. “It means it still has to get through Congress,” he said. “The secretary of education cannot unilaterally make any decisions on her own. She needs to be empowered by Congress, and the fact of the matter is that we’re going to need eight Democrats, according to the current means of the Senate, in order to get anything done. That’s going to be very difficult.

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