By John J. Duncan Jr.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending Knoxville lawyer Jeff Hagood’s swearing in ceremony as the newest member of the Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors.
I think President Trump made an excellent choice in appointing him to this board. When Jeff was first starting in law practice, he appeared in my court when I was a criminal court judge.
His practice quickly developed to be mostly civil, and he earned a well-deserved reputation as a kind, intelligent, very hard-working and very successful lawyer.
Jeff has a real heart for service and wants to help people in every way that he can. He grew up in Hawkins County and seems to have small town, conservative, patriotic values. I don’t believe he will ever forget the many lower-income ratepayers who have difficulty paying their utility bills.
When he was kind enough to call and invite me to his swearing in ceremony, we had a lengthy conversation about TVA. I told him that many times over the years while I was in Congress, I would complain about the salaries being paid to the top TVA executives.
I don’t know what the top salary is now, but AI reported that in 2024 and 2025 it was about $10.5 million. TVA has fought efforts to publicly disclose its top salaries, and in the past has attempted to cover up exact amounts by hiding some compensation as retention incentives, deferred payments, performance awards, etc. Now Rep. Burchett and two others have introduced a bill to at least require disclosure.
One time, Bill Johnson, who was president and CEO of TVA from 2013 to 2019, came to see me in my Knoxville office. I told him: “Mr. Johnson, I have no complaints about the job you’re doing. I just think you are paid way too much.”
I guess he knew of my concerns beforehand, because he immediately replied, “Well, I think you are paid way too little.” A few months later, I ran in to him at the Knoxville airport, and I jokingly told him that he was going to be in my book because of that answer.
When I brought up my longtime opposition to TVA’s excessive salaries to Jeff Hagood, I told him the huge salary at the very top meant that many close to the top were being overpaid, too. He laughed and said, “You sound like Trump.”
While I frequently complained about the salaries, I knew there was nothing I could do about it because no one else in the Tennessee congressional delegation, all good friends of mine, really cared about it and were afraid to criticize TVA.
So, it was music to my ears when President Trump blasted the CEO salary in April of 2020 not long after I left office. And I was very pleased when Jeff told me the president mentioned this to him when he talked to him about his appointment to the board. The president can do something about this through his appointments if he chooses to do so.
I recently had dinner with the current head of TVA at a Knoxville charity event, and he could not have been nicer. But if all the top executives at TVA made half of what they are now making, they still would be making some of the highest salaries in Tennessee.
And Tennessee is not North Dakota. This state is one of the most popular in this country, and the Knoxville and Nashville areas are also two of the most popular areas to move to. And with no state income tax, you don’t have to pay ridiculous salaries to get people here.
People, and especially federal bureaucrats, can rationalize almost anything. Some say TVA has to pay excessive salaries because Duke Power and some other utilities are paying even higher salaries. Well, two wrongs don’t make a right. The problem is that these big utilities don’t have any competition. No one likes competition, but it makes everything better.
Finally, two TVA stories: First, we live part of the time in Grainger County on Cherokee Lake. The annual meeting of the Appalachian Electric Co-op usually draws about 2,000 people because of free food and other giveaways.
One year, TVA’s Bill Johnson was the main speaker, and I spoke briefly just before him. I think one of the biggest rounds of applause I ever received was when I said: “Mr. Johnson, you seem like a nice man. I just think you lower this lake too much and too soon.”
Second, in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater was running for president and was flying to Knoxville to speak at the airport. Guy Smith, editor of the Knoxville Journal, got an advance copy of his speech, in which Goldwater advocated the sale of TVA.
Howard Baker was running his first (and losing) race for the U.S. Senate, and my father was running his first (and winning) race for the U. S. House. They both agreed that they should not even go to the airport if Goldwater was going to devote an important part of his speech to TVA.
So then lawyer Baker, who was elected senator in 1966, called his father-in-law, Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate Leader, who called the Goldwater plane and got him to delete the TVA part of speech on his way into Knoxville.
