Billionaires (and their corporations) do not make for good neighbors. While they claim to bring prosperity for everyone, their primary concern is to capture our local governments and take whatever they can get from our communities in land, labor, and resources – all for their private profit. The result? Billionaires have become exponentially richer as the rest of us live with a growing affordability crisis. This series is about the impact billionaires have on our everyday lives when they move into our backyards. This is a re-release of a post that came out in 2024 with updated campaign finance data.
On a hot July day in Tampa at the 2022 Moms for Liberty Summit, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the crowd that the US Department of Education should be abolished. This claim – that the very department she led should not exist – earned her a standing ovation from the Moms for Liberty members in the room.
Now in 2026, Betsy DeVos’s goal of abolishing the Department of Education is close to being a reality. Former professional wrestling executive and current Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, not only cut 45% of the Department of Education’s staff but she also offloaded over 100 programs including the enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and student civil rights to other federal agencies – decisions that disability rights advocates fought against for months.
McMahon’s cuts put the burden of funding and protecting public education back on the states, where Betsy DeVos and her husband have long been waging a war against public education. In recent years their legislative efforts to demonize and defund public schools at the state level have been supercharged by another billionaire: Jeff Yass, the co-founder and Managing Director of the Philadelphia-based investment and trading firm Susquehanna International Group. Together, Yass and DeVos have spent over $100 million to influence the outcomes of elections in over 230 state legislative districts across the country and given a total of $64.25 million to Governors and candidates for Governor across eight states.
Map: Yass, DeVos Spending in State Legislative Races 2022-2026
Worth more than $67 billion, Yass has exploded onto the conservative political scene over the past few election cycles. Through Susquehanna International Group, Yass was an early investor in the company that owns TikTok. As TikTok grew Yass’s net worth increased by more than 5 times between 2021 and 2026, and his political spending grew alongside his wealth. In just the past few years Yass has become one of the most influential conservative donors in Pennsylvania and the United States. So far in the 2026 election cycle, Yass has already spent more than $85 million on federal elections and $17 million in Pennsylvania.
Despite going to public schools himself for most of his education, Yass has spent tens of millions of dollars towards efforts to privatize the U.S. education system. Worth over twelve times more than the DeVos family, Yass’s massive contributions have supercharged the long-standing DeVos family strategy of attacking public education on a state level where their millions of dollars can go further to influence elections and therefore state policy.
In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner in June 2026, Yass was frank about his strategy to privatize education at a state level by supporting primary challenges to pro-public school Republicans. He used his spending in Texas in 2024 as an example, stating “[the Texas voucher bill] almost didn’t happen due to unified Democratic opposition and a few Republicans who opposed school choice. That only changed because Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) had the courage to campaign against members of his own party. A few of us gave him the money to do it, working with former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.” He went on to say, “The same process of discipline for recalcitrant Republicans had to happen in Iowa … and it still needs to happen in Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s inexcusable for any Republican to carry water for the teachers unions at this moment of history, and I’ve enjoyed sending many of them into early retirement.”
Yass, DeVos Spending in State Legislative Races, Gubernatorial Races, and Ballot Measures from 2022 to 2026
Jeff Yass uses his immense wealth to influence state politics using several channels. He leverages the established DeVos American Federation for Children nonprofit network, he spends through his own School Freedom Fund PAC, and sometimes gives directly to state elected officials who then disperse his millions however they see fit.
In states where Yass and DeVos have spent millions to get anti-public school state legislative candidates elected – Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, and Oklahoma – they’ve achieved an impressive win rate. In every state they intervened in, the two billionaires won well over half of the races they spent in. In Texas their candidates won in 67% of the total districts where they spent money. In Montana their candidates won all 13 races they spent in – a 100% success rate.
Below are tables showing spending by Jeff Yass and Betsy DeVos’s school privatization PACs. The tables are separated into state legislative races, races for Governor, and state ballot measure initiatives. The tables can be sorted by state and total amount spent. Sources and more information can be found at this link.
A Tidal Wave of School Privatization in the States
Billionaire couple Richard and Betsy DeVos’s vehicle for their education agenda is the American Federation for Children (AFC), a large school privatization advocacy organization. Betsy DeVos was Chairman of the group from 2009 to 2016, when she joined the Trump administration, and had served on the board since at least 2004. The American Federation for Children has an extensive network of state level affiliate groups, PACs, political nonprofit organizations, and other political and electoral infrastructure that the DeVos family is still a major donor to. Starting in 2022, Jeff Yass took over the spot as the top donor to most of the PACs and nonprofit groups affiliated with AFC.
Since 2021, Yass has spent over $118 million dollars on federal school privatization PACs. He is the top donor to the Club for Growth Action PAC and he is essentially the sole donor to his own School Freedom Fund. In addition to these PACs, Yass has also spent large sums of money directly in states like Pennsylvania, Texas, Kentucky, and others where he has spent tens of millions supporting pro-charter candidates and attacking anti-charter candidates, no matter the party.
In 2022, Jeff Yass donated $2 million to the AFC Action Fund, a 527 political organization run by the Federation. The donation was the largest single donation ever given to the group and quickly made Yass the second largest donor to the group ever behind the DeVos family. In 2023, the Federation started a new PAC called AFC Victory Fund. According to the FEC, Jeff Yass is the largest donor to this PAC as well, giving nearly $13 million or 69% of the $15 million spent since 2023, while the DeVos family and their organization gave another $2.5 million. The American Federation for Children, uses this money on federal level lobbying for school choice policies and funds dozens of state level organizations in states like Ohio, Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and many others.
The massive growth in donations from Yass to DeVos’s political groups had an immediate impact on state education policy. Privatization advocates called 2023 a banner year for the so-called “school choice movement.” A record number of 20 states passed legislation that would further the goals of DeVos and the anti-public school movement. Iowa, Utah, and Florida all passed bills that would create or expand taxpayer funded Education Savings Accounts without any restrictions on what families can apply. Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Ohio all passed bills that would make it easier for taxpayer money to be used for charter and private schools. The CEO of the American Federation for Children took credit for the “tidal wave” of state level school choice bills getting passed with support of Jeff Yass.
Several states where Yass and DeVos have intervened have adopted or expanded school voucher tax credit programs that allow charter school scholarship donors to receive a portion of their donation back in the form of a tax credit. In Pennsylvania, Yass is the top recipient of this tax credit – receiving millions back in credits from the state. These programs paved the way for Trump to sign a federal school voucher tax credit bill into law in 2025 as part of his One Big Beautiful Bill – a program that DeVos pushed for during her tenure as Secretary of Education.
With Yass’s money and DeVos’s existing campaigning and state based electoral infrastructure, the two billionaires were able to successfully make education privatization a top issue among conservative leaders across the country. To accomplish that goal, Yass and DeVos took the fight to members of their own party.
Map: Yass, DeVos Spending in Races for Governor
Yass, DeVos Use Culture War Issues to Divide Republicans
Yass and DeVos have developed an efficient way of using their resources at the state level to pass meaningful legislation that further privatizes education around the country. Their strategy is to use their millions of dollars to target a handful of pro-public school Republicans, mostly in conservative states. Their goal is to remove any pro-public school Republicans from office and intimidate other state legislators into voting in alignment with the billionaires or risk facing a well funded primary challenge. This strategy has been extremely successful for Yass and DeVos. In many states, their money has allowed them to flip enough seats needed to pass school privatization legislation after spending in just a single primary election. It has also meant that in many conservative states, even rural states without many private or charter schools, the top issue among many Republican state legislators has become school privatization.
In states like Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Idaho rural Republicans saw voucher bills as threats to education access in rural areas. Many of these rural Republicans voted against funding private school vouchers because there were no private school options in their districts and they worried it would divert critical funding away from already struggling rural public schools. In a recent primary race in West Virginia, a candidate targeted and defeated by Yass told the press that school choice was not his top issue because “school choice isn’t an issue typically brought up by his constituents.”
Yass and DeVos enter these primary races with an understanding that their position is unpopular. Rather than running ads about school choice, most of the ads run by the AFC Victory Fund and the School Freedom Fund focus on culture war issues and taxes to scare and divide Republicans who may not agree with them on education. In recent ads attacking Republican legislator George Nikolakakos in Montana, who voted against a bill that would have given tax credits for donations to charter and private schools, the School Freedom Fund claimed that Nikolakakos was “allowing illegal aliens to take Montana jobs” and “pushing radical gender ideology on kids.” Another ad targeting Texas State Representative Travis Clardy, who had voted against creating a school voucher program in Texas, blamed Clardy for an “East Texas school districting [bringing in] a critical race theory specialist,” and attacked him for claiming that Texas did not have a problem with woke teachers.
As Secretary McMahon abdicates any federal responsibility to protect public school students, state funding and leadership becomes critical to the success of public schools, teachers, and students. While billionaires like Betsy DeVos and Jeff Yass exert their power through massive campaign contributions, public school advocates and teachers unions have also used their power to organize people and votes. That organizing has defeated the billionaire agenda in states like Kentucky and Pennsylvania. The All Eyes on Yass Campaign in Pennsylvania exposed Yass’s massive spending and ultimately voters and legislators defeated a school voucher bill in 2023. Voters in Kentucky voted overwhelmingly to reject a 2024 ballot initiative, heavily funded by Yass, that would allow tax dollars to be spent on private and charter schools. As Yass and DeVos ramp up their efforts to privatize education at the state and federal level, public school advocates must find a way to expose billionaire spending and organize voters to reject the billionaire agenda to defund and destroy public education.