Foxx jumped into the 1974 school board race — and lost. Instead of wallowing in the defeat, however, she came to appreciate her abilities, going on to earn a doctorate in education, rise through the ranks of academia and serve a decade in the North Carolina state Senate. Now in her 18^th year as a member of Congress, she is the rare Republican to score an exception from her party’s term limits on committee chairships in Congress, entrusting her to lead on hot-button education and labor issues going into 2024.

“I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time,” said Foxx, who’s become one of the leading female voices on culture war issues when some of the loudest critics have been men, such as Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.

Since taking the helm of the House Education and Workforce Committee, she’s secured House passage for the GOP’s cornerstone education plan for a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a bill restricting transgender student athletes, and helped build the conservative case against President Joe Biden’s Labor secretary nominee, Julie Su.

“She’s just a bull, and she just charges in every day, nonstop, from sun up until way after the sun goes down,” former House Speaker John Boehner said in an interview.

In more than a dozen interviews, Boehner and others describe why Foxx’s leadership style made her the GOP’s top choice for shepherding some of its core priorities as families and presidential candidates stake a claim about what should happen in the classroom and on the job.

Unraveling Biden’s policies

When Foxx first wielded the House Education and Workforce gavel in 2017, she devoted herself to shredding the Obama administration’s education and labor policies under the Trump presidency. Now, she’s set about doing the same with the Biden administration.

Foxx has cleared several bills out of her committee and passed her party’s “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” which outlines how parents can participate in their children’s education, with minor internal pushback in the House. She also passed a measure to nullify Biden’s debt cancellation program before the Supreme Court ultimately blocked it.

She has simultaneously led efforts against Su, a former California labor commissioner Biden installed as acting Labor secretary: from a confrontational House hearing to a GAO inquiry that precipitated the demise of her confirmation process, and legislation that would prevent her from serving in an acting capacity. And she’s prepared to use the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to undo executive branch policies, to attack a Labor Department rule that would qualify more workers as employees instead of independent contractors. She’s already helped shepherd a CRA resolution to Biden’s desk that would have unraveled an agency rule permitting retirement investing tied to environmental and social goals.

“We’ve got more challenges [on labor] than we have in the education space,” Foxx said. “But we’ll be looking for every opportunity that we have to do some things.”

Soon she plans to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act — which funds most of the U.S.’ workforce development programs — after helping to shepherd its enactment almost a decade ago.

“I can’t wait to get into it,” Foxx said. “WIOA was passed in exactly the same situation we’re in right now: We had a Republican House, a Democrat Senate, and a Democrat president.”

Bipartisan talks fell apart last Congress after Republicans refused to sign off on how much Democrats wanted to spend. But Foxx already sees areas for the committee to come together, including allowing Pell grants for short-term education programs. The federal aid is designed to support the nation’s lowest-income students.

Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the committee’s top Democrat, agrees that there’s “widespread support” for expanding Pell grants to cover short-term programs — but added “there are differences on the details” that need to be worked out.

He acknowledged that he and Foxx maintain “a modicum of decorum in the committee even though we have some of the most contentious issues within our jurisdiction.”

‘Some very divisive conversations’

Her tenure at the gavel has also been fraught at times as she tries to lead a divided Congress through legislation on some of the nation’s top culture war issues.

“She has not made [education] No. 1 in terms of funding,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), a member of Foxx’s committee who said Foxx and the Republican Party are “politically profiting off of the frustration and discontent of the pandemic and the schools that weren’t open.”

During a 16-hour bill markup in March, Republicans rejected Democratic bids to include amendments that reinforced teaching the history of underrepresented groups in schools. Then a Republican lawmaker tried to add an amendment on teaching about the Holocaust.

“So I said, ‘Well, how are you defining Holocaust? Are you making sure that it covers not only the 6 million Jews, but the 6 million other people that were killed by the Nazis in a systematic way? Would it include homosexuals, the gypsies?’” Takano recalled.

“There was a moment that set off a chain of events where the chairwoman was just like, ‘Well, wait a minute, we can’t allow everybody,’” Takano said. “All of a sudden, the newsfeed went out” just as it seemed Foxx was beginning to lose her composure.

Other Democrats on the committee have also criticized Foxx’s priorities, including her focus on expanding school choice and hearings on what is taught in schools when campuses are grappling with school safety.

“We’re having some very divisive conversations around curriculum,” said Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who would have preferred Foxx’s challenger Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) to lead the committee. “My simple question is, how many students are dying because of curriculum? None.”

‘My goal was to survive’

Foxx grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia with no power or running water and parents with a 9th grade education. After working as a janitor through high school, she became the first in her family to graduate high school.

“Growing up, my goal was to survive,” Foxx said in an interview.

Her husband was living in a bus when they first met. Together, they launched a plant nursery and landscaping business, which their daughter now runs. Early profits allowed Foxx to pursue a master’s degree in college teaching, which landed her a job as a professor and later a community college president.

That experience showed her “I can help people in the county I grew up in — and help people who didn’t have the opportunity when they were younger, perhaps especially women, to go on to college,” she said.

Her early years in politics revealed the kind of chair she would go on to become.

North Carolina Senate President Phil Berger recalls attending a parade with her when they ran for the same district in 2000. Foxx lived three hours away from the starting point; Berger, 10 miles.

“I probably got there at 9:00, about an hour before the parade started,” Berger said. “Virginia was already there, and her car was, if not the first in line, in the first four or five cars.”

During her time in the state Senate, he remembered Foxx going up and down aisles at the grocery store to introduce herself and talk to people about their families and problems.

Once Foxx got to Capitol Hill in 2005, she immediately began earning a reputation as someone unafraid to speak their mind. “She can say things to people that no one else could say and get away with it,” said former House Speaker Paul Ryan, the last Republican lawmaker to receive a waiver from the party’s limits on chairships.

‘Anything else, for me, is gravy’

Just a few weeks after the announcement that she’d received a waiver to once again lead the House committee for education and workforce issues, Foxx sat in her Rayburn office in Washington, D.C., to discuss how she won the waiver and what that accomplishment means. Few thought the Republican steering committee would grant it because of the party’s self-imposed term limits and grumblings about what it would mean for Republicans in a similar situation next Congress.

Foxx said the discussion was never about her qualifications, but she set a high bar by having nearly every member of her committee support her bid.

“Thirty years ago, I was having dinner with a good friend” who had also grown up poor, and “he said to me, ‘You know, Virginia, you and I have accomplished more than anybody ever expected us to do. So anything else we do is gravy,’” Foxx said.

“I feel like I’ve already achieved a lot of success, so anything else for me is gravy,” she said.