THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Then like every good toady before her, Betsy DeVos plans to pillage the existing Higher Education Law with regulations removing any restriction on criminal activity.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, frustrated by stalled efforts in Congress to rewrite the federal law governing higher education law, is moving ahead with a plan to overhaul the system through her regulatory powers.

Her determination was ratified on Thursday by the chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander, who told a New York Times education conference in New York that the Senate will not produce promised higher education legislation this year.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the committee’s ranking Democrat, has said repeatedly that her party is not the problem. She is willing to come to the table to negotiate a rewrite of the Higher Education Act if the talks include talks on college affordability beyond the changes to the existing financial aid application, a dominant concern of Mr. Alexander’s.

She has also said the two senators could not renegotiate the higher education law in good faith when Ms. DeVos has not enforced the elementary and secondary education law that she and Mr. Alexander crafted in 2015. She said Ms. DeVos is approving state education reform plans that do not properly consider minority and other underserved student populations, as the law requires. Mr. Alexander and Ms. DeVos disagree.

Mr. Alexander’s problems extend well beyond the Democratic Party.

A conservative rewrite of the decades-old Higher Education Act has passed the House Education and the Workforce Committee, but the panel’s chairwoman, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, has not gotten a vote on the House floor. Her version, which would remove constraints on for-profit and religious institutions, cannot pass the Senate, where the Republicans hold a one-seat majority.

Meanwhile, Ms. DeVos has announced a sweeping regulatory agenda that targets revisions to key accountability measurements in the existing law, such as accreditation, credit hour and making nontraditional programs, such as “competency-based education,” eligible for federal financial aid. Competency-based education makes the acquisition of specific skills — not just test-taking and attendance — key graduation requirements.

Mr. Alexander backed changes to eligibility rules for financial aid, “so you just don’t get paid in whether your butts in a seat or not; you get paid if you’re learning.”

The department has already taken measures to renegotiate rules around for-profit colleges, which have been tarred by scandal, and the handling of sexual assault cases on college campuses.

Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for Ms. DeVos, said the secretary is in constant communication with Republican leaders in the House and the Senate, and “is unequivocally supportive of their efforts to reauthorize the H.E.A. this Congress.” But Ms. DeVos will not wait for Democrats, she said.

“While a full rewrite of the law by Congress is the preferred method for fixing H.E.A., it requires a willingness by Democrats to come to the table,” she said. “As long as Democrats continue to be unwilling to engage in productive bipartisan discussions around common sense solutions, the department must move forward with the law that we have.”

Mr. Alexander generally praised Ms. DeVos’s willingness to step in to complex topics, such as Title IX, the part of the Higher Education Act that governs sexual harassment and misconduct on campus. Ms. DeVos is revising existing rules to be more sensitive to students and faculty accused of misconduct and to pull back from automatic investigations into virtually any allegation.

With the rule of law becoming a memory in Washington, DeVos has been well primed by her henchmen to devolve he American system of education to two parts, Sunday School and highly lucrative tax devouring private enterprises.