Tennessee’s two senators last month said Tennessee Valley Authority top officials were unfit to lead a nuclear revival. They didn’t mince words: President Donald Trump should push out former TVA CEO Jeff Lyash.
Instead, Trump did something perfectly legal: He fired two board members, including TVA board chair Joe Ritch, leaving TVA without a quorum — effectively grounding any significant policy and project decisions at America’s largest public utility.
In a March op-ed, Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty argued TVA had not moved fast enough to develop small modular reactors that could help drive the deployment of more nuclear technology nationally. To that end, they asked Trump to intervene and stop the utility’s “paralysis” by appointing an interim CEO.
The president’s firing of Ritch came days after the board announced a permanent replacement for Lyash, who said in January he intended to step down.
