One third of the board that governs the Tennessee Valley Authority is being vacated today after the Republican-controlled Senate failed last year to confirm President Barack Obama’s reappointment of three Democratic directors for America’s biggest government-owned utility.
TVA Chairman Joe Ritch and the chairmen of two key board committees, Peter Mahurin and Mike McWherter, leave the TVA board today after they helped revamp the leadership and generation mix of TVA over the past five years.
Although major customer groups and even Tennessee’s Republican senators said they support the current direction of TVA, incoming President Donald Trump will soon have a chance to name new directors for TVA who could reshape the federal agency created as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. Combined with two additional board vacancies this year, Trump could appoint a majority of the nine-member TVA board as soon as May 18.
Trump did not speak about TVA during his presidential campaign last year, but he has pledged to reform how government works and repeatedly promised on the campaign trail he would revive America’s coal industry by changing some regulations on fossil fuels. Trump could try to use TVA to help promote more coal generation or to promote other federal energy policies.
Economist Leonard S. Hyman has even suggested that the Trump administration might try to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority.