Posted on 01/31/2025 2:28:23 PM PST by Libloather
WASHINGTON — Tennessee Valley Authority CEO Jeff Lyash — the highest-paid federal employee with a compensation package of $10.5 million per year — abruptly announced Friday that he was retiring 11 days after the return to office of President Trump, who during his first term slammed Lyash’s “ridiculous” pay and vowed to fire him.
“Sounds like Lyash got DOGE’d,” a senior administration official told The Post, referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to rein in allegedly wasteful federal spending.
A TVA rep denied that Lyash was departing either in response to or to get ahead of pressure from Trump’s team after six years in the job.
“The answer is no,” spokeswoman Melissa Greene told The Post. “When Jeff was hired in 2019, he told the TVA Board of Directors that he would let them know when he was seriously considering retirement. Jeff kept his word, beginning those conversations with the Board last fall.”
In his good-bye message, Lyash wrote: “While I’m looking forward to my next chapter, spending more time with family, grandchildren, and friends, I will miss our TVA team and the relationships we’ve built across this region.”
“The true strength of TVA is its people – an experienced and passionate workforce who work every day to make a difference,” Lyash added.
Trump tore into Lyash during the final year of the 45th presidency, saying in August 2020 that “we’re getting rid of him in one form or another. Either the board’s gonna do it, or we’re gonna do it, but he’s gone.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Ok federali. Cuts are coming.
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You are way overpaid for whatever it is that you do for the federal government.
Ha! After committing to an enormously expensive small-nuclear project. The rule in the power industry is to never be the first in a technology because your customers will suffer financially.
I wonder if he’s getting the same (times 10,000) severance package that I got...
TVA is probably the most independent of the fed entities. It keeps getting picked for the chopping block, but that never seems to quite happen.
They justify the CEO’s wages as being “competitive” in the power industry. Not quite sure why it has to be that freakin competitive, but there it is.
Yeah, a monolith of sorts, you don’t want to do something “unauthorized” to or in the river.
Not sure if his leaving will change things a lot - his predecessor, the Big Johnson - desecrated the pension system, cutting in half, the amount that was put in my retirement account every pay period in order to save money. He did up the TVA match to the 401K, but my personal approach to retirement included more pension, less personal risk. Also, any new employees in the last 8 years or so is offered NO pension, unlike the rest of the electric utility industry.
His predecessor was also responsible for most (but not all) of the coal plant decommissioning, a good portion of which was not replaced (which was a huge factor in the rolling blackouts on 12/23/2023 and 12/24/2023, the first time in TVA’s history). The entire Widows Creek plant was decommissioned and not replaced, and the Paradise Fossil plant was decommissioned, replacing about 2100 megawatts of coal with 1100 megawatts of gas generation. They’re playing catchup now, and have made a lot of inroads but not sufficient to keep up with the increased demand as half of California moves to Tennessee to escape communism.
“you don’t want to do something “unauthorized” to or in the river.”
No kidding. Major hoop jumping and permitting to request cutting down a spindly tree. And then it’s denied. If caught doing it, major fines.
You can’t call and talk to anybody. You leave a voice mail and they call you back in a few days. Once. If you can’t answer, too bad. Start over. again.
And in the meantime, you’d better not plant a tree close to the transmission line ROW or they will come and chop it down. Actually, that is justified as there needs to be a clearance between trees and major transmission lines. See the NERC report on the northeast blackout of 2003 for details (and that was my previous employer’s doing, who I left 2 years before the blackout so I’m in the clear).
Anyway, the point is, they can do things “willy-nilly” that us common folk can’t do.
As a power company employee, there’s worse places to work and better places. But TVA does pretend to be federal when it helps TVA and non-federal when that approach helps TVA.
I retired 3 weeks ago. :)
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