Tennessee U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) introduced the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Salary Transparency Act on Tuesday.
The TVA Salary Transparency Act, filed in the Senate as S.1354, seeks to increase public transparency regarding executive compensation at TVA.
As the nation’s largest federally owned electric utility corporation, TVA provides electricity for 153 local power companies serving approximately 10 million people across seven states. TVA also provides electricity directly to about 60 large industrial customers and federal installations.
The bill would require TVA to annually report to Congress the names, salaries, and job duties of all employees at the management level or above – including all executives and board members – earning more than $123,041 per year or the maximum basic pay rate of a General Schedule Grade 15 (GS-15) federal employee.
In addition, the bill would exempt TVA’s salary report from being eliminated under the Federal Reports Elimination and Sunset Act of 1995, which eliminated a previous requirement in the TVA Act mandating annual salary disclosures to Congress.
The information reported to Congress under the bill would be exempt from FOIA disclosure and the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which makes many agency reports publicly available online.
Blackburn said the bill “would provide critical transparency into the salaries of federal employees at the TVA by reinstating the requirement that TVA report this information to Congress.”
“The government and public utilities owned by the government work for the American people – not the other way around,” Blackburn added.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, the TVA Salary Transparency Act, filed as H.R.144 and sponsored by Tennessee U.S. Representatives Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) and Steve Cohen (D-TN-09), passed unanimously earlier this year.
The measure, which was first introduced in 2024, came about after a 2023 oversight hearing before the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment in which TVA’s CEO at the time, Jeff Lyash, testified that TVA has repeatedly declined requests to provide salary information under the Federal Reports Elimination and Sunset Act.
Lyash, who earned $10.5 million in 2023 as the highest-paid federal government employee at the time, retired from the position earlier this year and was succeeded in the role by Don Moul.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo TVA Control Room” by TVA.
