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| Trump Diversifies Cabinet; Picks Nikki Haley and Betsy DeVos | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump named two prominent Republican women to cabinet posts on Wednesday, recruiting Betsy DeVos, a prominent Republican philanthropist and educational activist, as education secretary, and Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina as ambassador to the United Nations. | |
| Moving swiftly to diversify his cabinet, Mr. Trump was also nearing an announcement that Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran an outsider’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, as secretary of housing and urban development. | |
| Ms. DeVos and Ms. Haley would be the first women in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, while Mr. Carson would be the first African-American. Ms. Haley is Indian-American and a rising star in Republican politics. But none of these choices suggest a president-elect who is reaching beyond reliably conservative circles for his major policy makers. | |
| A major Republican fund-raiser from Michigan, Ms. DeVos, 58, is a passionate believer in school choice, a subject that she and Mr. Trump discussed last week when she met him at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She is a member by marriage of the DeVos family, the founders of Amway and one of the largest contributors to the Michigan Republican Party. | A major Republican fund-raiser from Michigan, Ms. DeVos, 58, is a passionate believer in school choice, a subject that she and Mr. Trump discussed last week when she met him at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She is a member by marriage of the DeVos family, the founders of Amway and one of the largest contributors to the Michigan Republican Party. |
| “The status quo in education is not acceptable,” Ms. DeVos said in a statement. “Together, we can work to make transformational change that ensures every student in America has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential.” | “The status quo in education is not acceptable,” Ms. DeVos said in a statement. “Together, we can work to make transformational change that ensures every student in America has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential.” |
| Ms. DeVos, a former finance chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, is one of the nation’s most avid proponents of school choice. This includes charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically run independent of local school boards and teachers’ unions, and school vouchers, which give students tax dollars to apply toward private school tuition. | |
| In the three elections preceding 2016, members of her family gave nearly $9.5 million to party committees and candidates. But Ms. DeVos sharply criticized Mr. Trump this campaign, and spent much of the year raising money for other Republicans on the ballot. | |
| “Until we have a better reason to embrace and support the top of the ticket, and see an agenda that is truly an opportunity agenda, then we have lots of other options in which to invest and spend our time helping,” she said in May. | |
| Ms. DeVos and her husband, Dick, have been the propelling force behind the rapid expansion of charter schools in Michigan, as founders of the Great Lakes Education Project. The state has one of the most generous charter school laws in the nation, allowing an unusually large number of colleges, universities, and school districts to grant charters, with little state oversight. | |
| An unusually high percentage of the charters — about 80 percent — are operated for profit. In Detroit, which has the nation’s second-highest share of students in charter schools, the charters have been characterized by a high churn of students, teachers, as well as the companies that operate the schools. Even groups that support charters have pushed to establish stricter oversight, but legislation to do so failed last spring, largely because of lobbying by the DeVos’ group. | |
| Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, criticized the selection in a statement emailed to reporters, saying Ms. DeVos’s work over the years had “done more to undermine public education than support students.” | |
| “She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers — which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense,” Ms. Garcia said. “These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students, while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps.” | |
| Mr. Trump’s selection of Ms. DeVos, Ms. Haley and Mr. Carson could blunt criticism that his early picks have come from a homogeneous group of older white men. | |
| If she is confirmed, Ms. Haley will step down as governor and be replaced by the state’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, who was an early and vocal supporter of Mr. Trump. | |
| Mr. Carson would be the first African-American member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet – and a familiar face to millions of Americans after a Republican primary campaign in which he briefly soared to the top of the polls. It was not clear whether Mr. Carson had accepted the offer. | |
| Ms. Haley and Mr. Carson have no particular experience relating to the posts they have been offered. Mr. Carson had even seemed to take himself out of the running for a cabinet position last week, with his friends putting out word that he had concluded that he was not qualified to run a vast federal bureaucracy. | |
| Ms. Haley supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican primaries, and, like Ms. DeVos, was a prominent and frequent critic of Mr. Trump early in his run. That criticism was thought to have kept her off Mr. Trump’s list of vice-presidential candidates, although her name was mentioned before he chose Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana. | |
| In recent days, Mr. Trump has begun meeting with a wider array of prospects, either for advice or as potential cabinet picks. He is also said to be considering Harold Ford Jr., an African-American former Democratic representative from Tennessee, as transportation secretary, or for another post, though those talks have not become serious, according to an official close to the Trump transition. | |
| Mr. Trump also met with Michelle Rhee, the former superintendent of schools in Washington and Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii Democrat who is the first Hindu member of Congress. | |
| Until Wednesday, however, his appointments had consisted of five white men: Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist in the White House, Reince Priebus as chief of staff, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney general, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas as director of the C.I.A., and Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser. He is rumored to be close to naming Gen. James N. Mattis as secretary of defense. |