Trump and TN Senators Manufacture a Crisis to Reward Megadonor with TVA Board Seat

The President’s appointments to and management of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Board of Directors should be a serious undertaking. TVA is the nation’s largest public power utility, serving over 10 million customers and providing electric service to parts of seven southeastern states while managing the nation’s fifth-largest river system. The federal agency is governed by a nine-member Board of Directors, who are appointed by the U.S. President and approved by the Senate. The current administration, aided and abetted by the senators of Tennessee, is making a political mockery of the TVA Board process and purpose. 

First, Senators Blackburn and Hagerty attempted unsuccessfully to micromanage the selection process for the replacement of the retiring TVA CEO, Jeff Lyash. This was followed soon after by the highly unusual removal by President Trump, without cause or explanation, of two sitting TVA Board members who had been appointed by the previous administration and had time left on their five-year terms. With the removal of these two sitting TVA Board members, the 12 billion dollar public corporation was forced into a non-quorum situation with its Board of Directors. 

The Board’s lack of quorum is a politically manufactured “crisis” that was further exacerbated weeks later by the abrupt removal of a third sitting Board member, again without cause or explanation and with a year left on her term. 

In the past week, the Trump Administration has put forth four new TVA Board nominations, and the same Tennessee senators have been pressuring the Senate to move quickly to overcome the TVA Board being in a non-quorum state. One of the new nominees, Nashville socialite Lee Beaman, is a megadonor to Blackburn and other Republican candidates and causes in amounts exceeding millions of dollars.

This is clearly a self-imposed and manufactured “crisis” orchestrated by the Trump Administration and the Tennessee senators. The removal of three duly appointed TVA Board members in good standing with time remaining on their five-year appointments and replacing them with hyperpartisan campaign contributors of the senators involved in the nomination process takes the partisan nature of the TVA Board selection process to a level never seen before in TVA’s history. This is a dangerous precedent and represents a new low point in professional leadership at the agency.  

TVA is a complex organization with multiple competing missions that are difficult to balance. It literally takes years for new Board members to gain the insights needed to balance the energy, economic, and environmental missions of TVA. Few Board members come prepared with the necessary understanding of this balancing act, and to abruptly remove Board members mid-term degrades the professional leadership even more. It can take months to years for appointees to clear the approval and nomination process, already shortening the set staggered five-year Board terms. These recent actions set the precedent for a new President to abruptly remove sitting TVA Board members for politically motivated reasons and will only further shorten the TVA Board experience level. 

Experience & Character Matter

TVA’s Board is tasked with two competing and arguably unrealistic mandates — managing a multibillion-dollar corporation while simultaneously providing regulatory oversight of the same corporation. They are already overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting their decisions. They have no independent professional staff and are forced to rely on TVA executive staff for understanding of complex and technical energy issues at one of the nation’s largest electric utilities. No other utility of the size of TVA has this dysfunctional structure. All others of this size are subject to independent regulatory review by their state(s). This act of codifying hyperpartisan shortened terms for TVA Board members will only make this dysfunctional structure worse. 

Approximately fifty percent of the customers in the Tennessee Valley are women, with many paying the utility bills, including single mothers. It is a completely tone-deaf move and outside of the stated goals of the appointments that two of the sitting TVA board members removed were women, Michelle Moore and Beth Geer, both with a year left in their terms. The remaining Board members and the proposed replacements are all white men. Megadonor Lee Beaman appears to have a history as a serial philanderer and reportedly had his fourth wife watch “training videos” of him having sex with prostitutes before she divorced him. There was a time when high moral character mattered for positions of leadership in public power positions.

The 2005 changes to the TVA Act, led by Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, that expanded the TVA Board from three members to nine clearly state that the Board appointments “seek qualified members from among persons who reflect the diversity, including the geographical diversity, and needs of the service area of the Corporation.”

I will state again that the President’s appointments to and management of the TVA Board of Directors should be a serious undertaking. Instead, what we are seeing today is an administration and two senators from Tennessee who clearly do not take the appointment process or the purpose of the Board seriously. They are facilitating the dangerous precedent of undercutting sitting TVA Board members’ terms for their own gain by appointing their favorite megadonors, with no regard for the 10 million people of the Tennessee Valley. The Senate has rules and procedures for good federal governance and should use its “advice and consent” by not approving this proposed slate of new TVA Board members.

The post Trump and TN Senators Manufacture a Crisis to Reward Megadonor with TVA Board Seat appeared first on Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE).