GOP megadonor car salesman may soon dictate your electric bill
If you're a Republican politician in Tennessee, chances are Lee Beaman has cut you a check. Now, he might be responsible for how much comes out of yours to pay your power bill
In the past year alone, Lee Beaman — a rich car salesman from Nashville — has given over $400,000 to republican politicians and GOP-aligned PACs.1
Lee Beaman has been a known quantity around Tennessee, and especially Nashville, for decades. He has rarely met a republican candidate or conservative cause that he wasn’t willing to open his checkbook for.
The extremely dogged veteran reporter, Sam Stockard, pulled together a sampling of Beaman’s state-level donations for the Tennessee Lookout back in 2022. Again, these are massive amounts of money for small snippets in time, so you can imagine the type of coin this guy is shelling out over his lifetime to financially support republicans.
Beaman also likes to use his wealth to torpedo any semblance of progress in Nashville, including two major transit initiatives (I was a key part of the 2018 transit campaign that failed miserably), and a 2009 effort to pass an English only amendment to Nashville’s charter.
He is one of the first phone calls a republican political hopeful in Tennessee makes, and that financial gravitas has seen quite the ROI recently.
What the f*ck is the TVA? It’s where Roosevelt let us all work for an honest day’s pay
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a controversial entity, and is currently the subject of potential privatization talks. Since many of y’all probably aren’t familiar, I drew up a handsome little bulleted list below with some info :)
Some facts about the TVA, because I like New Deal stuff
For people who aren’t public utility ball-knowers, here are some fast facts about the TVA:
It is the largest public utility in the country.
Part of FDR’s New Deal created by Congress in 1933. It had several goals, including:
Harnessing the power of the Tennessee River to bring electricity to the Tennessee Valley
Control catastrophic flooding
Provide desperately needed jobs for the region
Today, it provides electricity to about 10 million people (including ya boi)
Although it is owned by the federal government, it receives no taxpayer funding and operates on a self-funded model
Their CEO made $5.7 million this year, making him the highest paid federal employee
The legendary Jason Isbell made a song about it called “TVA” and it is a fucking banger
The TVA isn’t without flaws2, but it keeps our utility bills relatively stable and is not in the business of paying dividends to shareholders. I like the TVA. Call me TVA-pilled, call me a TVA-stan, call me whatever the hell you want, but I want it to stay public.
John F*cking Rich
And fuck John Rich for planting the goddamn bug in Donald Trump’s ear about privatizing it.
Beaman nominated to TVA Board
Back in July, Trump nominated Beaman to the TVA’s board. The TVA board itself is pretty wild, and holds a tremendous amount of power over the utility’s operations.
ELI5: The TVA Board
Here is your “explain like I’m five years old” rundown of the TVA Board of Directors
Composed of nine members who are nominated by POTUS and confirmed by the Senate. 7 of 9 must be residents of TVA’s service area.
The board is tasked with establishing the “broad strategies, goals, objectives, long-range plans, and policies of the TVA”. This means they decide things like the power generation portfolio (what % of their portfolio is renewable vs. coal, etc.) And most importantly, they set the wholesale power rates.
Currently, six seats on the board are vacant — meaning they lack a quorum and cannot make major decisions like rate hikes.
For the curious, here are their bylaws.
Bad News Beaman
As you can see, the TVA Board has a tremendous amount of power, 11.1% of which could soon be in Lee Beaman’s hands.
Beaman has absolutely zero experience in public utilities, or the energy sector, whatsoever.
In a March 2025 POWER magazine op-ed, the senators claimed TVA needed “visionary industrial leaders” with “serious energy expertise.” Yet both have lined up behind Beaman, a nominee with little apparent background in energy, utilities, or infrastructure.
(Source: Energy & Policy Institute)
What he does have are connections to more republicans and other wealthy conservative donors than most other people in the entire country.
It also probably helps that he owns a Capitol Hill row home where many Republican congressmen reside
About the only thing even halfway decent from his most recent Senate testimony is that he views nuclear power as valuable, and “the future of power in the United States and probably around the world.”3
Beaman has technically stated that he thinks TVA should remain public, but you cannot take him at his word when we’re talking about Donald Trump. Trump has the power to stack the board with loyalists, given the number of vacancies, and we already know how easy it is for him to exert his will over anyone in the greater GOP orbit.
Aside from very likely being a dyed-in-the-wool Trump loyalist, Beaman also has….shall we say….potential character flaws.
Extremely disturbing divorce filings from ex-wife
When Beaman’s divorce proceedings became public in 2018, it was a local spectacle unto itself.
Rather than put my own spin on the details, I’ll share a blurb from the venerable Stephen Elliott’s reporting for the Nashville Scene at the time.
In her trial brief, Beaman’s fourth wife Kelley alleges that Lee Beaman made her watch videos of him having sex with a prostitute — what he called “training videos.” On more than one occasion, Kelley Beaman alleges, her husband persuaded her to have joint sexual encounters with prostitutes. Kelley Beaman says that
It gets worse….
Lee Beaman was so addicted to pornography that he would watch it on his iPad while sitting in the same room as his family, including his minor son.
Beaman appears to be a self-absorbed man obsessed with his own wealth and power, including the power he exercised over his then-wife.
She admits to an affair of her own toward the end of the marriage, though she suggests his reaction to learning of her infidelity is further proof of his “degradation, control, manipulation and abuse.” According to his wife, Beaman made her confess to the affair on conference calls with several of their friends and associates and used knowledge of the affair to force her to do things he wanted her to do.
These revelations temporarily tarnished his public image when they came out in 2018, but Beaman soon recovered. It clearly hasn’t prevented him from ascending to influential levers of power.
I am pessimistic that the senate will vote his nomination down, and I worry greatly about the future of TVA considering it will be stacked with loyalists to our fascist authoritarian president. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Thank you for reading.
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No Elegy Needed is an opinion column Substack. All views expressed are solely the opinions of the author and in no way are to be interpreted as anything besides that. I am not a journalist, I am not a reporter, nor do I claim to be one. This is an expression of opinion for entertainment purposes only.
This is just federal donations. This does not include state and local.
I’m not ignorant to this. Many people rightfully fault it during its creation, when dam construction flooded entire towns and displaced 15,000+ people.
I realize nuclear power can be controversial, but I firmly believe it is mostly clean energy source that is absolutely necessary if we are to ever reach a clean energy future devoid of fossil fuels.
OMG thanks for this story. Thank god for the TVA! Jason Isbell's song is so moving. I've been living amongst, kayaking, and hiking in the beautiful watershed and on the rivers of the TVA in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, for over 25 years. So glad to know this backstory about the importance of this public utility. And I sure as heck hope we citizens can help block Senate approval of this Tennessee snake Lea Beaman to its board. Any info on when the vote will be scheduled?
The econ system now dominant (emphasis on 'con') comes out of the Chicago School of Economics as founded by Milton Friedman. Who advised Pinochet, the vicious dictator of Chile, because "democracy interferes with Market efficiency."
More than 4 decades ago, neolibs (supporters of this econopathy) usurped the Dem party. They ditched the New Deal and abandoned the majority working class. I know because as a blue collar rank and file union activist for 28 years, I witnessed it. And as a local Dem campaign mgr, I fought it. These Ds repealed New Deal financial regs, a cause of the '08 Great Recession. They bailed out Wall St. while the millions of us who lost jobs, pensions, and houses got nothing. Then these same D elitists added smug insult to our injury: "a basket of deplorables." Nary a word of criticism about an economics that considers devastation of human communities and ecological destruction to be externalities. Irrelevant, in other words.
I began learning about the bases of economic theories during the huge 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations I'm proud to say became known as The Battle of Seattle. (My hometown.) But I went back to college in my 50s, so had to set aside the econ stuff. Started again last year. I expected to find differences in the interpretation of econ data. But I discovered there is little, if any, empirical evidence for the current system. It came out of a deep hatred of the New Deal and of Keynes and consists of inadequate assumptions plus blatant assertions. Like Thatcher's "There are no alternatives." There certainly are--and they were proven to work! Alt. economists know, but dissent, even with mountains of stats and well reasoned arguments, does not get published in mainstream journals nor do proponents get tenure in the prestigious universities. I'm in the process of learning from some of them directly.