Trump urged to drop plan to sell TVA unit

Despite their partisan differences, the entire Tennessee congressional delegation, plus four other lawmakers in Kentucky and Alabama, appealed to President Trump Wednesday to abandon his proposal to sell the transmission assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The 15 Tennessee Valley members of Congress wrote in support of keeping TVA in its present form contrary to a proposal in the White House budget plan to authorize TVA to sell its power transmission operations to another power company. In a letter to Trump, the members of Congress warned that splitting up TVA’s generation and transmission assets could threaten the low-cost power model offered by the federal utility, which was created to serve the 7-state Tennessee Valley in 1933.

“Previous administrations have proposed selling TVA and its assets and these proposals have all been soundly rejected by Congress,” the members wrote. “When President Obama proposed selling TVA in 2013, all it did was undermine TVA’s credit, raise interest rates on TVA’s debt, and threaten to increase electric bills for 9 million ratepayers.”

In the White House infrastructure plan unveiled in February, the Trump administration said TVA and other similar federal agencies should be given the authority to divest of their transmission assets “where the agencies can demonstrate an increase in value from the sale would optimize the taxpayer value for federal assets.”