Washington: President-elect Donald Trump has named two prominent Republican women to cabinet level posts, recruiting Betsy DeVos, a prominent Republican philanthropist and educational activist, as education secretary, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina as ambassador to the United Nations.
Moving swiftly to diversify his cabinet, Trump was also nearing an announcement of Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran an outsider's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, as secretary of housing and urban development.
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Trump chooses surprise ambassador to UN
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has in the past been a bitter critic of President-elect Donald Trump, but now she'll represent him at the United Nations.
DeVos and Haley would be the first women in Trump's cabinet (the ambassador post has a cabinet-level rank), while Carson would be the first African-American. 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 policymakers.
A major Republican fundraiser from Michigan, DeVos, 58, is a passionate believer in school choice, a subject that she and Trump discussed last week when she met him at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. 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.
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"The status quo in education is not acceptable," DeVos said in a statement. "Together, we can work to make transformational change that ensures every student in America has the opportunity to fulfil his or her highest potential."
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 $US9.5 million ($12.8 million) to party committees and candidates. But DeVos sharply criticised 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.
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 characterised by a high churn of students and 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, criticised the selection in a statement emailed to reporters, saying DeVos' 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," Garcia said. "These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students, while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps."
Trump's selection of DeVos, Haley and Carson could blunt criticism that his early picks have come from a homogeneous group of older white men.
If she is confirmed, 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 Trump.
Carson would be the first African-American member of 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 Carson had accepted the offer.
Haley and Carson have no particular experience relating to the posts they have been offered. 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.
Haley supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican primaries, and, like DeVos, was a prominent and frequent critic of Trump early in his run. That criticism was thought to have kept her off Trump's list of vice-presidential candidates, although her name was mentioned before he chose Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
In recent days, 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 team.
Trump also met with Michelle Rhee, the former superintendent of schools in Washington and Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, representative from Hawaii, who is the first Hindu member of Congress.
Until Wednesday, however, his appointments had consisted of five white men: Stephen Bannon as chief strategist in the White House, Reince Priebus as chief of staff, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney-general, Kansas representative Mike Pompeo as director of the CIA, and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He is rumoured to be close to naming General James Mattis as secretary of defence.
The New York Times
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