For more than a decade, the Tennessee Valley Authority has been off track from its original mission of providing affordable, reliable, and abundant energy. Instead, it has pursued green energy, promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as woke ESG initiatives, and induced rolling blackouts during both warm and cold weather in Tennessee and its larger, seven-state footprint. This is not a model of success or a track record to be proud of.
And, on top of double-digit energy price increases over just the past two years, TVA will give more than $260 million in bonuses to 10,900 employees. This is on top of a CEO who earns historically around $10 million a year (though this year’s compensation has been slightly less) and an organization that once planned to ship American jobs overseas to India.
Thankfully, there’s a new sheriff in town. President Donald Trump nominated five new TVA board members, four of whom were just approved by the Senate. Another one, businessman Lee Beaman, should hopefully be approved soon. It’s worth noting that TVA’s board has been in such disarray that it has lacked a quorum even to do official business for most of the calendar year.
With the federal government reopened, the Senate did its job in approving most of Trump’s nominees, so TVA can start acting on implementing Trump’s vision for a renewed energy provider focused on getting back to its fundamentals of abundant, affordable, and reliable energy for the seven-state TVA region.
Thankfully, Trump supports cleaning house after the Biden-era TVA focused on ESG, green energy, and DEI. Trump’s clearing out of Biden-era board members and appointing new leadership to help restore accountability is a welcome step toward TVA reform. TVA’s renewed focus is simple: The newly confirmed board should focus on providing affordable and reliable energy, not chasing pet projects or expanding government bureaucracy.
However, at the state level, some leaders in Tennessee want to do the exact opposite by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize TVA-regulated, government-owned utilities offering broadband, another historic pet project of TVA. This misguided approach will expand the government’s role, ignore market realities, and gamble with taxpayer dollars on models we already know don’t work.
Also, is it wise to invest taxpayer dollars to expand broadband when, according to the Beacon Center of Tennessee, more than 95% of Tennesseans already have access to broadband? Plus, wireless internet and innovations such as Starlink make government-owned networks even more obsolete.
Leaders in Tennessee should beware, as should state legislatures in TVA’s other six states: Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. This is a southeastern regional problem, and governors and legislators in all these states need to help keep TVA accountable and focused on providing reliable, affordable, and abundant energy instead of pet projects of the Left.
The good news on broadband? There’s a better way forward with money that was already dedicated under the Biden administration. Like it or not, it’s there and is getting spent. If states across the country want to get broadband right, policymakers should take the same approach we expect in every other sector: trust the market.
MIKE JOHNSON’S BIG ENERGY WINS
Make one-time investments in providers with a proven record of service delivery, scalability, and sustainability. Encourage competition, not monopolies. Remove barriers that make it harder for private investment to reach underserved areas. And above all, keep taxpayers protected from the endless drain of propping up failing government experiments time and time again.
If the new TVA board stays true to free market principles and ushers in Trump’s vision of liberty, accountability, and trust in the private sector, TVA will prove that competition and the free market still deliver the best results.
Hannah Cox is the co-founder and president of BASEDPolitics and the owner of Athens Media.
