Washington, D.C. -Today, Congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA), the Chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, and Oversight and Reform Committee Member Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) sent a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seeking a response to a document request made in March 2019 for documents and information on the federal private school voucher program in the District of Columbia.
“We write to express our concern that the Department of Education has failed to respond to the March 29, 2019, document request from the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Committee on Education and Labor on the private school voucher program in the District of Columbia," Cummings, Scott and Norton wrote. “The Department’s response is now more than three months overdue. We request that the Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, Frank Brogan, whose office is responsible for the private school voucher program, come to a meeting on August 7, 2019, to address the Department’s failure to respond."
Over the last three and a half months, Committee staff have followed up repeatedly to seek the documents, but the Department has not complied.
The District of Columbia voucher program is the nation’s only federally funded or federally created voucher program. Since 2004, Congress has appropriated more than $200 million for the program. Authorization for the voucher program expires on Sept. 30, 2019.
