A New Controversy Is Dogging DeVos’s Education Dept. Here’s What You Need to Know.

After Democrats won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November, observers predicted that Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, would face fresh scrutiny. DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist, has hired officials with ties to for-profit education, and critics have long alleged that those ties have helped drive her department’s higher-education policy. With new investigatory powers, House Democrats — led by Rep. Bobby C. Scott of Virginia, the new head of the body’s education committee — signaled a desire to investigate.

On Tuesday, congressional Democrats sent DeVos a letter demanding information about a controversy that has appeared to metastasize in recent weeks. It involves accreditors, a watchdog agency, and lots of acronyms. It’s a little hard to follow, so let’s start at the beginning:

In 2016 the Obama administration revoked the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (Acics), an accreditor that had faced waves of criticism for failing to police the for-profit colleges it accredited. For instance, Acics accredited Corinthian Colleges, which shut down in 2015 after heightened federal scrutiny. Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and 2020 presidential contender, had accused Acics of “cranking open the spigot to allow taxpayer funds to flow to some of the sleaziest actors in higher education.”

Fast forward to 2017, when President Trump selected DeVos as his education secretary. Some observers immediately suspected that her broad support of privatized education would translate to friendlier treatment of for-profit colleges. Ensuing events gave those skeptics more ammunition. In the opening months of DeVos’s tenure, the department rolled back some Obama-era initiatives that targeted for-profits.

Meanwhile, in 2018, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration had acted too hastily in revoking Acics’ recognition. Observers had already expected the DeVos Education Department to slow-walk or reverse the decision; the ruling appeared to buoy that possibility.

In September of that year, the department’s top higher-education official, Diane Auer Jones, wrote that Acics was satisfying all but two standards necessary for federal recognition, and that it should be given a year to satisfy those two. That move strongly suggested that DeVos would reinstate the recognition, which she did late last year.

This is where things get interesting. DeVos’s decision caught the eye of congressional Democrats, who in December asked the department’s watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General, or OIG, to investigate it. The office responded by saying it would conduct an investigation, according to the letter Democrats sent on Tuesday.

In January a senior official in the department wrote to the acting head of the office, Sandra D. Bruce, saying the decision to investigate was “disturbing” and asking the office to “reconsider,” according to Democrats’ Tuesday letter. Bruce pushed back, according to the letter, responding that the investigation would continue. Weeks later Bruce was removed and replaced with the department’s deputy general counsel.

It didn’t last. The department quickly reversed the decision following criticism from Democrats, but that didn’t quiet the backlash. “The public deserves to know how this unethical and baffling decision was made in the first place and to be confident that it won’t happen again,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the Senate’s education committee, in a written statement. “I am going to hold the department accountable until we get those answers.”

That effort continued on Tuesday, when Democrats (led by Scott and Murray) demanded in their letter to DeVos that the department turn over more information about the decision to replace Bruce. “We are concerned,” they wrote, “that these actions … represent a clear attempt to violate the statutory independence of the OIG.”

Liz Hill, the department’s spokeswoman, told NBC News that the sequence of events laid out in the Democrats’ letter was inaccurate. “These claims are simply untrue and don’t match the actual sequence of events,” she said. “The Department of Education, under Secretary DeVos’s leadership, would never seek to undermine the independence of the inspector general. For anyone to insinuate otherwise is doing so with no basis in fact and purely for political gain.”

Andy Thomason is a senior editor at The Chronicle. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.