Elisabeth Dee DeVos (/dəˈvɒs/ də-VOSS; née Prince; born January 8, 1958) is an American politician, philanthropist, and former government official who served as the 11th United States secretary of education from 2017 to 2021.

[31][32] Former Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw, with whom DeVos served on a committee, said she is influenced by Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper, a founding figure in Christian Democracy political ideology.

In a 1997 op-ed for Roll Call, defending unlimited donations of "soft money" in political spending, DeVos compared government limits to Big Brother of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[1] Betsy was a founding board member of the James Madison Center for Free Speech which the DeVos family funded and whose "sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics".

"[46] During the Republican Party presidential primaries for the 2016 election, DeVos initially donated to Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina before eventually supporting Marco Rubio.

[51] Democratic senators raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest and questioned whether she and her family members would "benefit financially from actions" she could take as the U.S. Secretary of Education.

[51][54][55] In November 2019, Truth In Advertising filed complaints[56] against Neurocore with the Food and Drug Administration for unapproved medical devices[57] and the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing.

[62][63] Republican senator Ben Sasse said DeVos "has made a career out of standing up to powerful and connected special interests on behalf of poor kids who are too often forgotten by Washington".

[64] The confirmation hearing for DeVos was initially scheduled for January 10, 2017, but was delayed for one week after the Office of Government Ethics requested more time to review her financial disclosures.

[65][66] On January 17, 2017, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held the hearing, which lasted three-and-one-half hours and "quickly became a heated and partisan debate".

[67] Several media outlets reported that DeVos appeared to have plagiarized quotes from an Obama administration official in written answers submitted to the Senate committee.

[70][71][72] DeVos's comment was later lampooned by television personalities Kate McKinnon on Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and James Corden.

[92] Botel, a registered Democrat who supported President Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement, founded the KIPP Ujima Village Academy in Baltimore, after working for Teach For America.

[92] In mid-May 2018, The New York Times reported that under DeVos, the size of the team investigating abuses and fraud by for-profit colleges was reduced from about twelve members under the Obama administration to three, with their task also being scaled back to "processing student loan forgiveness applications and looking at smaller compliance cases".

[97] DeVos delivered her first extended policy address on March 29, 2017, at the Brookings Institution which included the topic of school choice which has been her main advocacy issue for more than 30 years.

[98] She stated an interest in implementing choice policies directed toward children as individuals and criticizing the Obama administration's additional funding of $7 billion for the U.S.'s worst-performing schools as "throwing money at the problem" in an attempt to find a solution.

[100] In a May 2017 House of Representatives committee hearing, Rep. Katherine Clark, said an Indiana private school which takes publicly funded vouchers maintains it is entitled to deny admission to LGBTQ students or those coming from families with "homosexual or bisexual activity."

[102] On June 6, 2017, DeVos said states' rights would determine private schools being allocated funds by the federal government during an appearance before members of a House appropriations committee.

[103] On April 11, 2017, DeVos undid several Obama administration policy memos issued by John King Jr. and Ted Mitchell which were designed to protect student loan borrowers.

[104] On July 6, 2017, Democratic attorneys-general in 18 states and Washington, D.C., led by Massachusetts attorney-general Maura Healey, filed a federal lawsuit against DeVos for suspending the implementation of rules that were meant to protect students attending for-profit colleges.

[105][106] On September 12, 2018, DeVos lost the lawsuit brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia, which accused the Department of Education of improperly delaying implementation of regulations protecting student loan borrowers from predatory practices.

[134] In September 2020, it was reported that the Office of the Special Counsel had investigated DeVos over potential violations of the Hatch Act after she appeared on Fox News during the 2020 election campaign, where she attacked Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.

[138] Hours after her resignation, Senator Elizabeth Warren later called her the worst Secretary of Education on Twitter, saying she never did anything to help students, and saying she would rather quit than invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution to remove Trump from office.

[157] The DeVoses' gift, part of which would be spent on arts groups in Michigan that had been hit hard by the recession, was the largest private donation in the Kennedy Center's history.

[177] During the 1990s, she served on the boards of Children First America and the American Education Reform Council, which sought to expand school choice through vouchers and tax credits.

Douglas N. Harris, professor of economics at Tulane University, wrote in a 2016 The New York Times op-ed that DeVos was partly responsible for "what even charter advocates acknowledge is the biggest school reform disaster in the country".

These examples were contested by Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas and Education Week reporter Ben Herold on the basis that the actual graduation rates were roughly only half as large as DeVos had stated.

[189][190][191] Betsy DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA, a private military services contractor.

[23][192][193] In February 2017, artist Glenn McCoy created a political cartoon called Trying to Trash Betsy DeVos, based on Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With.

"[198] In the series' fourteenth season, drag queen Jasmine Kennedie appeared as DeVos for the show's signature celebrity impersonation challenge, Snatch Game.