Betsy DeVos didn’t just receive criticism from members of Congress on Tuesday over the Trump Administration’s proposal to cut funding for the Special Olympics. The Washington Post reports plenty of people expressed their unhappiness online, as well, when the Education Secretary testified before a House subcommittee.
Among those decrying the funding proposal were several ESPN personalities, which perhaps shouldn’t have been surprising, given the network’s long association with the Special Olympics. The organization works to provide athletic opportunities for children and adults with intellectual and physical disabilities, and ESPN has been airing Special Olympics events for more than three decades, including extensive coverage of the recent World Games in Abu Dhabi.
ESPN’s Julie Foudy, Kevin Negandhi and Jen Lada played major roles in that coverage, and they each took to social media Tuesday to laud the benefits of the Special Olympics. Saying that the “world needs more” of the organization’s work, Foudy, a soccer analyst and former U.S. team star, tweeted, “The joy those athletes pass on is absolutely contagious.”
Please read this @BetsyDeVosED. God, you need to only spend .01 minute watching these @SpecialOlympics athletes perform to understand the power of this program. https://t.co/kg5vemPUfu— Julie Foudy (@JulieFoudy) March 26, 2019
The amount of money potentially saved by the government if it eliminated its support for the Special Olympics would be $17.6 million. That’s a relative drop in the bucket for a sprawling federal agency, but the Trump Administration is looking to cut over $8.5 billion, or approximately 12 percent, from the Education Department budget.
“We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget,” DeVos said Tuesday in an exchange with Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) about the Special Olympics. He asked her if she knew “how many kids are going to be affected by that cut,” and when DeVos said she didn’t, he told her it would be 272,000 children.
DeVos described the Special Olympics as “an awesome organization” and “one that is well supported by the philanthropic sector.” A spokesman for the education secretary told CNN Tuesday that Devos, whose father and father-in-law were billionaire business executives, donated part of her salary to the organization last year and is “personally supportive of Special Olympics and its mission.”
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