The Tennessee Valley Authority TVA

In 1933 the Tennessee River valley was among the poorest places in the country, with eroded farms, recurring floods, malaria, and few homes with electricity. Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress for a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility of a private enterprise, and signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May 18, 1933. The TVA built a chain of dams that tamed the river, made it navigable for 650 miles, controlled floods, and generated cheap electricity that brought power to farms and drew industry, including, during World War II, the uranium plants at Oak Ridge.

Today the TVA is primarily an electric utility, the largest public power provider in the United States. It generates electricity at 29 hydroelectric dams, three nuclear plants with seven reactors, coal and natural gas plants, and solar facilities, and sells it wholesale to about 150 local power companies and cooperatives that serve roughly ten million people across Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. It still manages the river system for navigation, flood control, and recreation, and runs economic development programs to attract employers to the region.

The TVA receives no federal appropriations. It pays its costs from electricity sales, about 12 billion dollars a year, and finances construction by issuing its own bonds, which carry an implicit federal guarantee. A nine-member board of directors, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms, sets rates and policy and selects the chief executive, who is among the highest-paid officials of any federal entity. About 10,000 people work for the corporation. Its 2008 coal ash spill at the Kingston plant, which buried a community in toxic sludge, became one of the largest industrial disasters in the country and led to national rules on coal ash.

The TVA has been a lightning rod for arguments over public power since its creation, when private utilities fought it to the Supreme Court and lost. Presidents of both parties have floated selling it, and Congress has always refused, pressed by the region's delegation and customers who value its low rates. Debate now centers on how fast to retire coal plants, whether to build small modular nuclear reactors at its Clinch River site, and how to meet surging electricity demand from data centers. In 2025 the President removed several board members, leaving the board without a quorum for a period and raising questions about the independence Congress built into its structure.