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Betsy DeVos Is Getting Dragged After Announcing Her Plan To Cut Funding From The Special Olympics

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Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos flexed full-on super-villain Tuesday when she submitted her 2020 budget proposal before the House Appropriations Committee, which proposed — among other things — to completely cut funding for the Special Olympics. Although DeVos admitted that she found the Special Olympics to be “awesome,” her plan would cut $17.6 million in federal funding that currently goes to athletes, training facilities, and disabled children’s programs.

Instead, DeVos suggested that the sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities and physical disabilities could be funded completely with charitable donations, as it’s already “well-supported by the philanthropic sector.” Currently, the Special Olympics gets approximately 12 percent of its funding from the government, with the remainder of the $124 million annual income (as of 2017) coming from donations.

Although 12 percent may not seem like much, as usual DeVos didn’t seem to have a full grasp on what exactly that would mean for the kids who rely on that government funding.

In the committee meeting Rep. Mark Pocan asked DeVos: “Do you know how many kids are going to be affected by that cut?”

She answered: “I don’t know the number of kids.” Pocan replied: “It’s 272,000 kids.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is still bleeding money from the American people on his weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago — not to mention that that DeVos herself lives a transparently lavish lifestyle — and the irony has not been lost on people. As such, many took to Twitter to call out this latest affront on basic human decency from the Trump administration.

https://twitter.com/kashanacauley/status/1110707192145965056

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1110898681404768258

https://twitter.com/OhNoSheTwitnt/status/1110860178981822464

https://twitter.com/susie_meister/status/1110744982866952192

For what it’s worth, all three Trump administration budgets since 2016 have attempted to cut Special Olympics funding, with none yet to succeed. And now that the budget still has to pass through a Democrat-majority Congress it seems even more unlikely that the cuts will pass.

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