Education

Betsy DeVos Touts Shrinking DoE as First-Year Accomplishment

By Teresa Mull

Published February 9, 2018

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is proud of her department’s first-year regulatory brush-clearing:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proclaimed this week that her proudest accomplishments in her first year in office were shrinking the role of the agency, rolling back Obama-era initiatives and erasing outdated regulations.

DeVos rolled back key regulations and guidance documents intended to protect transgender students, student borrowers and victims of sexual assault — all in the name of reining in a department whose role she said had grown too large. She used budget cuts and buyouts to reduce the size of the agency.

DeVos speaks at a forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass., in September, where she was met with protests.

“Some of the most important work we’ve done in this first year has been around the area of overreach and rolling back the extended footprint of this department to a significant extent,” DeVos said Wednesday in a far-reaching interview with The Washington Post and other news organizations.

She is a rarity among education secretaries, having never worked in public schools before her appointment.

“I frankly think it’s been an asset because I don’t know what can’t be done,” DeVos said.