Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has submitted her resignation to President Trump after he incited a mob to breach the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, several news outlets reported on Thursday evening. DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist whose resignation is effective on Friday, is the latest high-level official to resign — while citing Trump’s newest attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power — in his administration’s waning days.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news that DeVos, one of Trump’s longest-serving cabinet members, was stepping down. In her resignation letter, posted by Politico, DeVos referenced Trump’s incitement of the Capitol insurrection. She wrote, in part:
“We should be highlighting and celebrating your administration’s many accomplishments on behalf of the American people. Instead, we are left to clean up the mess caused by violent protesters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business. That behavior was unconscionable for our country. There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and that is the inflection point for me.”
In the wake of Wednesday’s violence, DeVos and other cabinet members faced calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. DeVos, instead, will be the second cabinet official in a day to announce her intention to step down — following Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary.
DeVos’s tenure was controversial. She devoted much of it to rolling back several Obama-era regulations, including those that governed colleges’ handling of sexual assault and that granted relief to borrowers who had been defrauded by their colleges. She was sometimes a harsh critic of higher education, once proclaiming to a crowd of conservative students that college faculty members, “from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and, more ominously, what to think.”
So unpopular was DeVos among many liberal voters that Democratic contenders for president, including President-elect Joe Biden, used her as a foil on the campaign trail, vowing to replace her with a public-school teacher. Biden has since said he will nominate Miguel Cardona, the education commissioner in Connecticut, to the post.
