Filed under: Energy, U.S. Government, Public Utilities, Barack Obama
By MATTHEW DALY
WASHINGTON — In a political role reversal, Republicans are blasting President Barack Obama‘s plan to consider selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, an icon of the New Deal long targeted by conservatives as an example of government overreach.
Obama‘s 2014 budget proposal calls for a strategic review of the TVA, the nation’s largest public utility with 9 million customers in seven states from Virginia to Mississippi.
Selling the U.S.-owned power company could reduce the federal deficit by at least $25 billion and “help put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path,” Obama says in a budget document.
Not so fast, say GOP lawmakers in the region.
“It’s one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a longtime TVA champion.
“There is no assurance that selling TVA to a profit-making entity would reduce electric bills in the Tennessee Valley, and it could lead to higher electricity rates” for customers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, Alexander said.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vowed to “carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA” to ensure it continues to deliver affordable electricity throughout the region.
Privatizing TVA has been proposed before “and been determined to be a very bad idea,” added Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn.
Administration officials emphasized that privatization was just one option being considered. Sale of the agency has been discussed by prior administrations, but nothing has happened.
Indeed, proposals to sell TVA date back to soon after the agency was created in 1933 to reduce the risk of flooding in the region and bring electricity to rural communities in poor areas of Appalachia. It was a key part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, which used government spending to help the nation recover from the Great Depression.
President Dwight Eisenhower called TVA “creeping socialism,” while President Ronald Reagan criticized it as an example of big government. Republicans from Barry Goldwater to Newt Gingrich have pointed to the TVA as an example of where the private sector could provide services more cheaply and effectively than bureaucrats.
Republican antipathy for the TVA led many in the Southeast to assume that any proposal to sell TVA would come from the GOP — not a Democratic president fresh off winning a second term.
The privatization proposal “is making our heads spin here in Tennessee,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit group that promotes alternative energy throughout the region.
“For the first time that I’m
From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/16/obama-budget-plan-sell-tva/