# Is Betsy DeVos a criminal? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 19, 2020, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169 "2020-02-19T12:03:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/1 "2020-02-19T12:03:35Z")
It may well be that DeVos’s principal crime is stupidity. But isn’t it fraud — or at least extreme negligence — to accept a position for which one is so dramatically unqualified? She has surrounded herself with fraudsters — people who should be in prison are now setting government policy. Despite her billions, the U.S. taxpayer has been forced to cough up $20 million for her “security.” White-collar crimes are generally very hard to prosecute, and there’s a fuzzy line between prosecutable felony and other degrees of scummitude. _ **Four months ago, she was found personally in contempt by a federal judge. The contempt was for 16,000 counts of illegally demanding money from defrauded students, in some cases garnishing wages and tax refunds, all in direct violation of court order.** _ I’ll let the lawyers tell us whether 16,000 counts of defying court order is a high crime, or just a misdemeanor. It will sound over-dramatic but there’s no doubt that she and her brother, both billionaires, have caused more suffering than Tim McVeigh ever did. Here is a small part of what Google barfs up in response to “Betsy DeVos,” with of course focus on the recent news story. > [@](#): > > Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. _ **The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked.** _ > … > [Top staff at the DeVos Dept of Education are very often the very same people who were prosecuted by Obama’s government for fraud.] > “Secretary DeVos has filled the department with for-profit college hacks who only care about making sham schools rich and shutting down investigations into fraud,” [Senator] Warren said. > … > _**up to $1 billion awarded by the federal government’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) went to charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.**_ Our calculation was that a least a third of the $4.1 billion spent by the CSP was wasted. > > Members of Congress repeatedly referred to these findings when questioning the secretary’s management of charter school grants and her proposal to increase funding for the program to $500 million annually. In response, DeVos first attempted to deny the problem, saying, “You are always going to have schools that don’t make it.” … [Later] DeVos pivoted to attacking the report authors personally rather than disproving their findings, saying, “The study was really funded by and promoted by those who have a political agenda against charter schools.” That final exchange in particular raised the hackles of my coauthor Burris, who quickly delved deeper into the data to find that incidents of financial fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school grant program are likely worse than our first estimate. > … > [DeVos] never worked at or attended a public school; never had any personal experience with student loans; could not answer basic questions about federal law; has called public schools a “dead end” and said that government “sucks”; has described her work on education issues as an effort to “advance God’s Kingdom”; and has cited grizzly bear attacks as a reason for there to be guns in public schools. However, it’s really on the second issue—her transparent allegiance to corporate interests—that DeVos has proven more dangerous to the Department of Education and students across the country. > > _ **Indeed, last week a federal judge took the incredibly rare step of holding DeVos in contempt for violating a court order** _ that demanded her department stop enforcing loan collections against students who were defrauded by the now-defunct for-profit institution Corinthian College. > … > DeVos appointed Candice Jackson to a top job in the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Jackson said that 90 percent of college Title IX sexual assault allegations “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’ ” Some felons get off by pleading “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Maybe DeVos gets a similar pass because of her stupidity. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/2 "2020-02-19T12:24:19Z")
Nah, it’s not fraud to accept a position for which one is not capable of doing effectively but is legally qualified for. It’s just simply a stupid thing to do. _Verdict: stupidity_ The real issue is what is it for those idiots who approved her moniation? _Verdict: malfeasance (in the sense of “abuse of power”)_ ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/3 "2020-02-19T13:00:14Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > It will sound over-dramatic but there’s no doubt that she and her brother, both billionaires, have caused more suffering than Tim McVeigh ever did. I stopped reading here. Wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Dag\_Otto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/439d5e/32.png) [@Dag\_Otto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dag_Otto)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/4 "2020-02-19T13:36:57Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > It will sound over-dramatic but there’s no doubt that she and her brother, both billionaires, have caused more suffering than Tim McVeigh ever did. In a post about stupidity, you nailed it here. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/5 "2020-02-19T13:46:33Z")
I don’t think she is criminal, but she’s perhaps even more contemptible than Trump in some respects. She’s clearly in over her head even to a greater degree than he is, but she has illusions that she is pursuing a greater good than aggrandizing herself. ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/6 "2020-02-19T14:57:02Z")
But think of the children! She’s an advocate of having guns in schools to protect the children from grizzly bears\* and such. Do you people have any idea how many school children are killed each year by grizzly bears? I mean, sure, guns have killed a lot of school children, but think of the big picture. \*This isn’t satire, in case you don’t remember: [BETSY DEVOS: Guns in school protect against grizzly bears](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3xBGq3bvcQ) ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/7 "2020-02-19T15:05:46Z")
> [@Ravenman](#): > > She’s clearly in over her head even to a greater degree than he is, but she has illusions that she is pursuing a greater good than aggrandizing herself. The greater good in her mind being advancing “God’s Kingdom” and Christianity: [Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom’](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150) > [@](#): > > The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.” > > Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools. > > … > > In the interview, an audio recording, which was obtained by POLITICO, the couple is candid about how their Christian faith drives their efforts to reform American education. > > School choice, they say, leads to “greater Kingdom gain.” The two also lament that public schools have “displaced” the Church as the center of communities, and they cite school choice as a way to reverse that troubling trend. > > The audio from the private gathering, though 15 years old, offers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of DeVos’ personal views — views that may guide her decision-making as the nation’s top education official. DeVos has repeatedly said she wants policies that give families choices about their children’s education — the choice of public schools included — but her critics fear that her goal is to shift public funding from already beleaguered traditional public schools to private and religious schools. Pence, Pompeo, Barr, DeVos,… A lot of hardcore Christian nuts in this admin. And they serve a man, or at least pay lip service to in order to manipulate him, that views the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins as to-do bucket lists. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/8 "2020-02-19T16:18:01Z")
100% honesty here. I’m a career teacher, a union member, an activist, a Bernie Sanders supporter, a social justice warrior. It has never in the past four years, ever since I learned of Betsy Devos’s existence, occurred to me that anyone would ever say anything that would make me want to defend her in any way. Hell, when her yacht got vandalized, I was a giggler. The OP is pretty impressive. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/9 "2020-02-19T17:32:22Z")
> [@dasmoocher](#): > > The greater good in her mind being advancing “God’s Kingdom” and Christianity: > > [Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom’](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-education-trump-religion-232150) Anybody who wants the USA to be a kingdom of any sort can just get the fuck out of my country and move to some place that doesn’t mind being a kingdom. ETA: :mad: ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/10 "2020-02-19T17:48:56Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > Nah, it’s not fraud to accept a position for which one is not capable of doing effectively but is legally qualified for. If that was a crime, the prisons would be full of ambassadors. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/11 "2020-02-19T18:06:42Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#): > > Anybody who wants the USA to be a kingdom of any sort can just get the fuck out of my country and move to some place that doesn’t mind being a kingdom. > > ETA: :mad: This. They can get the fuck out. And they can take their own particular personal religious fairytales and heresies with them. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/12 "2020-02-19T18:44:24Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > It will sound over-dramatic but there’s no doubt that she and her brother, both billionaires, have caused more suffering than Tim McVeigh ever did. > [@Gatopescado](#): > > I stopped reading here. Wrong. > [@Dag\_Otto](#): > > In a post about stupidity, you nailed it here. Alas, it is the two of you who fail the simple text. It was a perversish quantitative claim, so we must get quantitative. What is the value of a human life? Some U.S. medical cost-cutters use $50,000 or $100,000 as a benchmark; and IIUC the British NHS has it lower than that. Let’s round these up to a _ **$1,000,000 per head** _ for our purpose here. That’s $168 million cost of McVeigh’s massacre; round it up to $250 million since there were injuries in addition to the 168 deaths. For DeVos we have the 16,000 counts of contempt, many of which had severe costs to these victims — job loss, jailings, bankruptcies, not to mention the actual sums pilfered illegally by DeVos’s action. She’s swindled the U.S. taxpayer of tens of millions in various ways; and helped cause many tens of thousands of students to waste money on fraudulent schools, or to get brainwashed by right-wing educators. She has degraded the public school experience considerable. Her policies have degraded teacher performance which probably led to many good teachers leaving the profession. _But let’s ignore the losses associated with teachers, taxpayer swindling, frauds and so on and just consider her pet charter schools, many of them run by her criminal(_) friends.\* There are 3 million children in charter schools in any given year; assume 3% of them are victims of DeVos policies. There are 50 million students in public schools; assume 0.2% are victims. Even with a modest $1000 estimate of per capita degradation that’s $190 million. On top of which, we must consider subsequent costs of deliberate mis-education. Preaching right-wing values, political fakery, and discouraging critical thinking may come back to bite these children — and society — in the future. The Trump Presidency came with a cost of at least $1 trillion easily. If there’s even a 0.1% chance that GOP-sponsored mis-education will lead to another fiasco at the ballot-box on par with the Election of Trump, that represents a $1 billion expected cost. (I’m afraid the chance is much higher. Of course other right-wing criminals, dolts and haters share some of the blame. \*-I use the term “criminal” to include illegal frauds where civil court judgement is easier to get than in criminal courts.) Furthermore note that I took care to include “her brother” in the quantitative comparison with Mr. McVeigh. Her brother may have cost more than Betsy. Recall that he operated a mercenaries for hire agency, which benefits from war. If you think he’s too virtuous to maximize profits of this business, let me sell you a bridge. Just for starters, one incident which has come to light: > [@](#): > > Blackwater came under increasing criticism after the Nisour Square massacre in September 2007, in which Blackwater employees opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding 20 more. Three guards were convicted in October 2014 of 14 manslaughter charges, and another of murder, in a U.S. court in 2019. The quantitative claim I made might have been slightly hyperbolic, but I think the arithmetic adds up. ---
**Author:** ![Cheesesteak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cheesesteak/32/3694_2.png) [@Cheesesteak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheesesteak)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/13 "2020-02-19T19:00:53Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > If that was a crime, the prisons would be full of ambassadors. This is an excellent point, but can you think of a reason we shouldn’t do it? ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2020, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/14 "2020-02-19T19:20:02Z")
Betsy DeVos was one of the many early signs that the Trump administration was going to be a total train wreck, contrary to the faint hope that some of us held that the pre-election Trump idiocy was just an act. A Secretary of Education who hates education is always ideal when the entire government has gone to shit. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2020, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-betsy-devos-a-criminal/848169/15 "2020-02-20T03:33:28Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > the faint hope that some of us held that the pre-election Trump idiocy was just an act What on Earth made you think that?