Betsy DeVos's Efforts to Defund the Special Olympics Unravel in Spectacular Fashion
Sometimes, billionaire education secretary Betsy DeVos pushes policies that are cruel: for example, her efforts to make student loan forgiveness nearly impossible to access. Sometimes, she pushes policies that are baffling: for example, her reported interest in allowing schools to buy guns using grant money earmarked for "improving school conditions." And sometimes, she pushes policies that treat the dignity of students as unaffordable luxuries: for example, her decision to make the department's Office of Civil Rights more "efficient" by allowing it to throw out complaints of wrongdoing that it deems inconvenient.
Rarely does Betsy DeVos have the opportunity to take a public stance that is all three of these things at once. And yet that is precisely what happened this week, when she unveiled a $64 billion proposed budget for her Department of Eduction that would quietly erase the $17.6 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for the Special Olympics.
Because the Constitution entrusts the appropriations process to the legislature, all executive branch budget requests are inherently aspirational documents, designed to convey the administration's values, influence public opinion, and perhaps preemptively set the agenda as lawmakers begin their work. (Monstrous, wacky footnotes are pretty common; last year, the Trump White House proposed to cut spending on the federal food stamps program, which provides flexible nutritional assistance to poor families with young children, by mailing those people giant cardboard boxes of canned goods and white bread instead.) It is safe to assume that many House Democrats will receive DeVos's opening offer, give its executive summary a courtesy skim, and drop it directly into the trash. There is no reason for her or any other Cabinet official to spout off third-rail ideas like this one, other than their compulsion to issue a periodic reminder of their tone-deafness.
The next day, DeVos responded to the entirely-predictable outrage over cutting Special Olympics funding by issuing an indignant statement claiming to "correct the record on Trump administration support for students with disabilities"—a general way of framing her omission of something specific. "It is unacceptable, shameful and counterproductive that the media and some members of Congress have spun up falsehoods and fully misrepresented the facts," she wrote. She went on to detail the portions of her budget that do relate to students with disabilities; asserted that the Special Olympics is capable of raising money via private philanthropy; and cited "our current budget realities" in explaining the department's inability to contribute.
Astute readers will note that at no point in this statement does DeVos refute or otherwise "correct" objectively factual reports that her budget proposal would eliminate funding for the Special Olympics. Astute readers will also note that her $64 billion budget request represents a significant decrease from the $71.5 billion Congress actually approved last year, and that $17.6 million still only represents 0.0275 percent of that already-reduced amount—"not even a rounding error," said Maria Shriver, daughter of Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, in a CNN op-ed. All of these data points would seem to cast doubt on her insinuation that the Department of Education's decision can be blamed on a good old-fashioned shortage of cash.
It was around this point in the news cycle that the controversy finally made its way to Donald Trump himself, who in a shouty, impromptu South Lawn conference told reporters that he had "overridden [his] people" after all. "I just authorized a funding for the Special Olympics," he declared, gently placing DeVos directly under the wheels of an oncoming school bus. (Again, this is something he has no ability to do, but I assume we are beyond the point of correcting Trump's understanding of the congressional appropriations process.)
Minutes later, DeVos came up with another statement in which she lauded Trump for "seeing eye to eye" with her, and claimed she had fought "behind the scenes" for "years" on this issue. This, of course, directly contradicts an explicit choice she had publicly defended until that precise moment. If DeVos's version of supporting the Special Olympics was "taking away literally all of its money," I shudder to imagine what her opposition to the Special Olympics might look like.
In closing, please take a moment to enjoy this footage in which a CNN reporter asks Betsy DeVos for comment on the controversy, to which she can respond only with a thousand-yard stare; a yearning for a world in which casual malevolence isn't so unpopular; and a silent plea for her elevator car to hurry the hell up.
