Let’s be clear. Betsy DeVos never ran any organization other than the American Federation for Children, a lobbying group for vouchers and charters, which she funded and owns.
Now she is the U.S. Secretary of Education, overseeing a large department with many functions crucial to K-12 education, higher education, student aid, and civil rights enforcement.
Given her well-known disdain for the federal role in education and her appointment of people determined to destroy the functions of the federal agency, we can assume that this reorganization is designed to cripple the agency and introduce a new level of dysfunction and chaos.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is moving to break apart her agency’s central budget office despite objections from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
DeVos last week removed the department’s top budget official and at least one other budget division director from their posts, reassigning the employees to jobs elsewhere in the agency. Top political appointees are also taking steps to make further reassignments of staff and functions in the budget office.
The budget office has had a strained relationship with DeVos and political appointees ever since the department’s full budget request last year was published by The Washington Post, days before its official release. And the office had been blamed, incorrectly, for other leaks, several department staffers said.
As part of a sweeping agencywide government reorganization ordered by President Donald Trump, DeVos wants to break up and decentralize all of the Education Department’s budget functions. The department’s overall plan, according to an internal presentation obtained by POLITICO last month, calls for a “restructuring of how we approach policy and budget development.”
OMB officials have objected to breaking apart the department’s Budget Service, according to four officials with knowledge of the situation. The disagreement comes as OMB has green-lighted most other parts of DeVos’ proposed overhaul of the agency, two officials said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This should be no surprise since Betsy is a long-standing member of ALEC and an obvious Dominionist.
I think many of Trump’s appointment were suggestions from Pence or high ranking members of the GOP and that’s how so many members of ALEC ended up in the Trump administration. And of course, contributions during his campaign played a role too. There were huge contributions from dark money sources that vanished. No one knows where a lot o that money went.
How much did Betsy conribute to the GOP that landed her the post she now holds?
“On 7 February 2017, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education in the new Trump administration by a narrow 51-50 margin, with the tie-breaking vote being cast by Vice President Mike Pence. All of the votes approving DeVos were cast by Republican senators, leading some of her detractors to posit the theory that she had essentially paid for her position via campaign contributions.”
Snopes rated this TRUE.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/devos-family-campaign-contributions/
Trump’s history also clearly reveals he doesn’t have many close friends and many of the people he has been in business with would probably not have qualified for appointments in his administration because they are members of organized crime and/or frauds like him, and many are not citizens since US banks stopped loaning him money a long time ago when he turned to Germany, China, and Russia for loans and other schemes to come up with enough cash to maintain his expensive lifestyle and facade of wealth.
The Kochs’ mistrust of public education can be traced to their father, Fred, who ranted and raved that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with “communist propaganda,” paranoia that extended to all unions … But while much of the media’s attention has been focused on the impact the wealthy Koch brothers have had on American politics, there is a far-right evangelical funding source called The Gathering that is of comparable scale and arguably wields even greater influence, both in the U.S. and worldwide. But Koch and The Gathering funding streams are not at odds; their dual affect is complimentary and converges towards a vision conceived by revolutionary Christian strategists, towards the biblical reconstruction of America and the world.
https://twocare.org/the-gathering-the-religious-rights-cash-cow/
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Decentralize all of the Education Department’s budget functions.
That seems to me a way to keep any one program from knowing what another is doing, also hiding from view a lot of mischief that might otherwise bring on an audit. Late last year, DeVos sent $12.5 million to “replicate and expand” the Rocketship franchise of computer-centric charter schools. I wonder if there was any legitimate review process, especially because that was at about the same time Rocketship abruptly closed a school in Tennessee.
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Decentralizing the budget functions has a few significant functions:
A) It gives each branch “autonomy” thus “choice” to do what they want
B) It creates inefficiencies in hiring people to handle budget functions and determine what gets bought, how it gets paid, when it gets paid, and from what fund.
C) You’ll get duplication and overlap with the different branches giving money to quite possibly the same schools or systems for similar/the same services.
D) You create gaps in service to school systems if no one decides to fund something in particular.
It will create choice within the department for their leaders focused on particular policy outcomes but make coordination and consistency of funding and predictability for schools less of a feature.
It’s not really a good idea.
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“and the sham of a government keeps accommodating these ridiculous ideas.”
You Still Don’t Know, Do You, Mr. Jones? by Paul Edwards
“A terrible fear is abroad in the land. The MSM has its thongs in a knot with dire warnings that our democracy is being attacked, subverted, betrayed.
Between Putin and the Russians and Trump and his clowns the cry is that America teeters on the brink of losing our priceless, cherished democracy.
Managing the Great Charade that supports the sanctified dogma that America is a democracy has been the first duty of the Capitalist engine that owns everything,
from the Founders down to today’s Imperial goat’s nest.
That democracy never functions and never has, Plato predicted and history confirms. This, notwithstanding the spin of one of the mightiest social and political reactionaries of all time–Mr. Churchill–that “democracy is the worst form of government known,
except all others.” Hey, it worked for him.
Our own financial upper crust–1% of the 1%–have ingested, along with all our means of production, all organs of public information, and by relentless application have indelibly incised their holy writ in the public soul. The sadly ignorant public internalized their deception and nourishes itself, for want of any substantial sustenance, on this fatally poisonous fairy tale.
Sham democracy makes inevitable rapid takeover and iron control of the state by its wealthiest, while the helpless, victim demos is cynically urged to validate its peonage by voting for an elite-vetted marionette. This, and not Exceptionalism, is the real American story. George Carlin said it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
The current political bomb cyclone of idiocy and hysteria that has hit us is a direct result of the one positive thing to come from Trump’s election: the rapid exposure and breakdown of the Deep State’s democracy charade…”
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NoBrick, Ahhhh, the U.S. Constitution does not support a democracy. It supports a Constitutional Republic ruled by law, and the few autocrats that allegedly influence your thinking want to revise that Consitution to turn the US into an alleged (fundamentalist) religious kleptocracy and destroy that republic and the democratic elements in it that allow people to vote for their representatives. When elected, those representatives, including the U.S. President, take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from both foreign and domestic enemies.
Trump is a traitor because he clearly lied when he took the oath of office.
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Barack Obama called on Americans to unify in the face of what he characterized as “challenges to our democracy” in a sweeping farewell speech …
Obama in Chicago speech: Protect democracy or risk taking path of Nazi Germany …
Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. … the meaning of our democracy.
The Constitutional “scholar” Barack included “our democracy”
in many talking points.
Hillary Clinton’s speech at the DNC. … I believe our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.
Hillary Clinton’s concession speech …Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful …
Trump speech…blather We are a mature democracy, blather…
“I think we’re all going to be held to account one day for what we did when our democracy is under threat,” Schiff said.
The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee says “democracy is under threat”…
Too many “Jones” to list.
“What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.”
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I am not sure what point you are making with this comment but I agree that our democracy is under threat, especially from forces within, such as the Koch brothers, who seek to stamp out everything that is public.
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If I stood on a busy corner in New York City and shouted one thousand times that the United States was a democracy that would not change the fact that the United States is a Constitutional Republic ruled by law and the three branches of the federal government were created to support that law, the US Constitution.
The use of the word democracy didn’t become popular in the United States until the early 20th century, but using that word doesn’t change the fact that the United States is a Constitutional Republic.
Yes, people that vote still elect their representatives at the local, state and federal levels just like they have done since the U.S. Constitution was written and ratified, and then those elected representatives take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies both domestic and foreign. There is nothing in that oath that says the U.S. is a democracy.
This same oath is taken by U.S. Senators when they are sworn in.
A similar oath is taken by every member of the Armed forces when they are sworn in, but there is a difference between an officer’s and enlisted person’s oath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5uacrX4tZw
USMC Officer Oath
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY3MlR-NWig
Marine Corps Enlisted Oath
Donald Trump is clearly an enemy of the U.S. Constitution. He lied the moment he said the 35-word oath. He never had any intent to defend the U.S. Constitution.
Educate yourself, No Brick, and read the original U.S. Constitution and all of its Amendments so you will understand what guides this Constitutional Republic. The people do not guide it. The U.S. Constitution and its amendments do that and it is the job of every elected representative swore an oath to let that document guide them when they are in office.
All the people do is vote them in and express what they think without fear of being punished because of the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that protects them so they can approve or protest what their elected representatives are doing.
When they gather by the thousands, those outspoken American people are not a mob as long as they protest peacefully but if they are attacked while protesting peacefully, they have a legal right to protect themselves from those that hate their right to express what they think.
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Another reason for abolishing the department. When will we ever learn? There is widespread support from all across the political spectrum, all the way back to Ronald Reagan, for abolition!
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Why this is scary:
On stuff pres knows something about, he does what only he wants. If his base thinks he’s screaming at the establishment and if his wealthy white men in a bubble are giddy over him – he does it.
On stuff he knows nothing about he’s as predictable as what was on fox news 10 minutes before he tweets it as policy.
Whenever Russia or Stormy get too much press, plays his favorite hits: Wall, Obama, Lock Her UP, infrastructure promises, North Korea taunts…
And, now he just makes S*** up for the news cycle.
“FRONTENAC • President Donald Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up facts in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether or not that was the case.”
ON EDUCATION – that’s really scary because he not only doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t care and it doesn’t play to his base or his wealthy cronies except privatizers.
And now it is clear somehow he has been annointed with the power to do anything he wants because GOP elected folks are scrard of him. (Sad – “Daddy, didn’t you speak up when he …” )
so – he’s really an indifferent puppet on education so we are all at the mercy of the highest bidder with the most self-serving ideas (starting with Devos
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Waiting for Sean Hannity to replace National Security Advisor
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Diane, it irks me that Devos seems to have escaped the intense media and blogger pressure as Trump has been talking about other cabinet members he is looking to rid of but devos really needs to go more than any other cabinet member. Shame, I guess money really does go a long way
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He fired Tillerson to take the heat off Betsy
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