Office of Inspector General

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    TVA’s $652 Million Turbine Came With Optional Contract Enforcement

    ByHugh Jass

    I have exhumed the Johnsonville turbine contract, and the document coughed. TVA’s planned project cost rose from $498.5 million to $652.2 million, which is already the familiar large-project ritual: announce one number, then watch it grow legs. But the TVA Office of Inspector General’s July 29, 2026 evaluation found a more revealing problem. The contract had rules for controlling costs. The rules were not decorative. They were simply treated like office furniture.

    According to the OIG, TVA incurred $20.9 million in avoidable costs, $8.97 million in unsupported costs, and more than $1.1 million in overpayments. Those are not my numbers; they belong to the report, where they sit under fluorescent lighting waiting for someone to explain why accountability required a separate authorization.

    The contradiction is wonderfully bureaucratic. This was not merely a turbine project becoming expensive in the mysterious way major projects do. The OIG found that TVA did not consistently enforce available contract provisions, including consequences tied to contractor performance. In other words, the agency possessed the legal equivalent of a stern school principal, a clipboard, and a very clear “no.” Then it appears to have asked whether the “no” had been properly routed through procurement.

    That is how institutional fog works. Ordinary people are told every dollar must be documented, justified, and defended, while the machinery overseeing a $652.2 million project can apparently leave enforcement tools resting in a drawer marked “later.” The contract did not disappear. Nobody misplaced the entire filing cabinet. TVA appears to have misplaced the part where the contract says costs can be rejected and consequences can be imposed.

    Exhibit A has a pulse: rules only protect the public when somebody uses them. Otherwise, they become expensive poetry, printed on paper and stored beside the missing attachment labeled “accountability.”

  • DOL’s “Common Interest” Shuffle: 48 Agreements, 13 Reviewed, 8 Recommendations, Still No Tracking

    ByHugh Jass

    I have seen many things in my line of work, but the particular haunt of this one is “common interest.” The Department of Labor calls these agreements a lawful way to share confidential information—then, in an Inspector General audit, DOL’s own paperwork starts acting like it’s allergic to accountability.

    The audit is OIG Report 09-26-001-08-001, issued June 30, 2026. It focused on a defined period (Jan. 1, 2023, through June 30, 2025) and looked at “common interest agreements” used across DOL components—specifically identifying 48 agreements in that window, with seven tied to EBSA and forty-one tied to the Wage and Hour Division.

    From those 48, the OIG reviewed a sample of 13, using an explicit compile-then-select approach—part random, part judgmental selection. That’s the kind of methodology you can show auditors, managers, and, if necessary, a judge: “We didn’t just guess.” Yet the findings read less like “we found a few bad apples” and more like “we never built the basket that tells you how many apples exist.”

    According to the OIG, DOL lacked sufficient formal policies or procedures, had weak internal coordination, and—most crucially for anyone who wants oversight beyond vibes—did not have adequate tracking mechanisms to determine, with confidence, how many agreements existed across the relevant universe. And then the plot twist: DOL agreed to all eight recommendations aimed at fixing the control and accountability gaps.

    So here’s the human stake, in plain language. EBSA and WHD exist to enforce worker protections, not to play administrative hide-and-seek with sensitive information-sharing arrangements. When the watchdog says the filing system can’t reliably tell you what’s in the folder, that’s not a theoretical problem—it’s the enforcement equivalent of being asked to prove a negative. The paperwork can reproduce; the tracking can’t. The document coughed; Exhibit A had a pulse; and still the agency’s answer was “trust us, we’ll improve.”

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