The DeVos family, from Wisconsin, is headed by Richard DeVos Sr., co-founder of Amway. Forbes estimates his wealth at $5.1 billion. Betsy is married to Richard DeVos Jr. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded the Blackwater group of mercenaries, infamous for their murders of innocent civilians in Iraq. The family are long-time allies of the Koch brothers.
The family has long been instrumental in bankrolling the inexorable slide to the right of the Republican party, having donated millions over the years to conservative groups and election campaigns, at the state and national level.
The family supported conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic organizations such as the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded conservative publications on college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which the Times called “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” The Council’s membership list, which was kept secret, included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups. Richard DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together “the doers and the donors.”Betsy DeVos is a religious conservative who has donated millions in attempts to close the gap between church and state, and to various anti-abortion and anti-homosexual causes across the country:
Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.She has spent a lot of money on legal efforts to impede campaign finance reform measures -- and she expects to get a return on her investment:
In 1997, she brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning up so-called “soft money,” a predecessor to today’s unlimited “dark money” election spending. “My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican National Committee,” she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “I have decided to stop taking offense,” she wrote, “at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”Her involvement with the education system has been to champion and financially support the proliferation of charter schools:
"Betsy ... spent more than two million dollars of the family’s money on a failed school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would have allowed Michigan residents to use public funds to pay for tuition at religious schools."Her only connection with public education has been to try to starve it to the benefit of charter schools.
Interestingly, she did not support Trump, saying he “does not represent the Republican Party.”
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