Trump-proposed pay ceiling would slash TVA CEO compensation by 90%

Trump-proposed pay ceiling would slash TVA CEO compensation by 90%

Mariah Franklin

Knoxville News Sentinel

March 12, 2026Updated March 13, 2026, 2:02 p.m. ET

• President Trump is urging the Tennessee Valley Authority's board to cap employee compensation at $500,000.
• The proposed cap would slash the pay of TVA CEO Don Moul, who earned $5.7 million in 2025, by over 90%.
• Trump has previously criticized TVA leadership over executive pay and a since-reversed decision to retire two coal plants.
• While the president cannot fire the CEO, the TVA board is now dominated by his appointees who can.

President Donald Trump is pressing the Tennessee Valley Authority's governing board to slash the pay of its CEO through a $500,000 compensation ceiling - one that would apply to all of the utility's 10,000-plus employees.

The TVA board, now dominated by Trump-appointed members, would reduce the direct compensation of TVA CEO Don Moul by more than 90% if its members agree to the limit outlined by the president in a March 11 memo. Moul has been CEO for just over a year, and in 2025 drew $5.7 million in executive pay, which includes incentives beyond his base salary.

Moul has been subject to criticism by the president over his pay and a since-reversed decision made under the leadership of former CEO Jeff Lyash to retire a pair of Tennessee coal plants. In his recent criticisms of TVA, Trump has cited the $10 million compensation for Lyash, who was denied a raise for two consecutive years in 2023 and 2024 before Moul took over.

The federal law that created TVA in the 1930s shapes executive pay. The compensation for TVA's CEO must be based on comparable compensation for similarly sized private utilities. The TVA board approves the CEO's pay, and ratepayers across TVA's seven-state service territory foot the bill for the utility's operations.

The president's memo also would affect other TVA executives, including Chief Financial Officer Tom Rice, who earned $2 million in 2025. Chief Nuclear Officer Matt Rasmussen drew $1.6 million last year, according to public filings.

"TVA's seven-figure compensation packages are inconsistent with other public sector leadership roles, where the President of the United States is paid $400,000 annually and the highest-paid governor in the nation earns roughly $254,000," White House officials said in a memo fact sheet. "This action brings the TVA's leadership pay into alignment with comparable positions in the Federal government."

These types of memos, according to the Library of Congress, are presidential directives that have the force of law if they are "founded on the authority of the President derived from the Constitution or statute." The limits in this specific memo, according to White House officials, are "for all new compensation arrangements."

The memo gives TVA's board 90 days to weigh approving measures to put the pay cap in place. In another 30 days, the board will have to send Trump a written certification detailing "the actions taken to carry out this memorandum."

The TVA board, according to Chair Mitch Graves, "has received the memorandum and is reviewing it."

What is CEO Don Moul's future at Tennessee Valley Authority?

Though Trump has disparaged Moul, he can't fire him. Only TVA's board has that authority.

Trump pushed the board to make that move in July, but was met with resistance from the board, according to reporting by The Atlantic. But the board now has different members and a quorum to act that it lacked over the summer.

Trump now has four appointees on the board: Arthur Graham, Mitch Graves, Jeff Hagood and Randall Jones. TVA Board Chair Bill Renick resigned in February, leaving just two who had been appointed by then-President Joe Biden: Bobby Klein and Wade White. Graves will serve out the remainder of Renick's term before Hagood takes over.

How well paid is TVA's CEO?

TVA's latest annual report shows that Moul made $5.7 million as CEO in the last fiscal year - about 34 times what the company's median employee made as of September.

Like his predecessor Lyash, Moul is the federal government's highest-paid employee. Unlike his predecessors, Moul has continued to serve as the utility's chief operating officer, the role he held at TVA before becoming its CEO in 2025.

Sticker shock at TVA pay is nothing new. Former TVA board member Susan Richardson Williams, who served on the utility board starting in 2006, after the director role shifted from a full-time job to a part-time position, told Knox News that when she joined, she thought the pay provided to executives was "outrageous."

"We looked at it," Williams said in a phone call. But cutting executive pay substantially would have been too big a hit to the utility's ability to keep and recruit talent, she said. "We wouldn't have been competitive."

If the $500,000 total cap is set, she said, it'll mean one thing: "mass exodus."

It's an argument TVA representatives have made routinely over the years. Salaries at companies such Duke Energy and Southern Power, a pair of major private utilities, also run in the millions. High performance and high pay are linked, TVA reps have said.

Trump in his first term as president also boggled at the pay for TVA's top spot. He said in 2020 amid a row with Lyash that the CEO should draw no more than $500,000 in pay.

Rep. Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat who has criticized both Trump and TVA leadership in the past, said that while standard executive pay across utilities might make a cut to $500,000 at TVA difficult, he agrees with the president that the TVA CEO's pay - and that of other executives at the utility - has climbed too high. A $500,000 cutoff would take it closer to where it should be, Cohen said.

"I think the salary of the CEO has gotten way out of line," he said in a phone call. He said he hadn't reviewed the memo specifically, but that he was unsure about the president's authority to issue the directive on pay, given federal requirements on TVA pay.

"I don't know that the president's statement is consistent with the law," he said. At the same time, he said, "I wish it were."

But some occasional opponents of TVA also said they had major reservations about the president's memo. Stephen Smith is the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an environmental nonprofit with a long history of working sometimes with and sometimes against TVA, in favor of renewable energy like wind and solar power.

"It's pure politics," Smith said by phone of the memo.

Reining in corporate excess is a good thing, Smith said.

"But this isn't a legitimate attempt to cut down on excess. This is an underhanded way to try to drive Don Moul out," he said.

Mariah Franklin reports on technology and energy for Knox News. Email: mariah.franklin@knoxnews.com. Signal: mariahfranklin.01