- Tennessee state officials and Elon Musk’s The Boring Company announced plans today for an underground tunnel connecting downtown Nashville to the airport along Murfreesboro Pike.
- In what sounds like a sweetheart deal for the world’s richest person, the tunnels would be designed by Musk’s drilling company and usage of the tunnels would be reserved for Musk’s electric vehicle company.
- As Tennessee faces a near $40 billion transportation backlog, Gov.
Bill Lee’s latest plan is to hand the keys—and the underground—to Elon Musk.
- How is this billionaire giveaway better than the state and city of Nashville working together to build a true public transit line from the airport to downtown Nashville?
- Musk’s most similar project, the Las Vegas Loop, was described by The Nevada Independent as “Teslas in Tunnels” and an “insult to public transportation.” “The Vegas Loop is a low-capacity Tesla advertisement designed around the needs of shareholders and tourists — not Las Vegas communities.”
- With more than 20 million annual visitors coming through BNA, a “low-capacity” private tunnel for Teslas hardly delivers a solution to Tennessee’s crippling congestion issue, which TDOT says costs drivers and businesses 17,000 hours in lost time and $442 million economic losses.
- Other serious questions remain as well. What’s the cost of surrendering public ground rights to the world’s richest man? Who profits from this private transit system—and who gets left out?
- Tennessee has urgent infrastructure needs, but instead of funding solutions that serve the many, this deal looks more like a high-tech vanity project that serves the few.
- Where’s the transparency? Where’s the oversight? And why is public infrastructure being built to benefit a billionaire’s private fleet?
Deja vu? Republicans launch new ‘Federal Education Deregulation’ task force to review potential K-12 funding cuts
Tomorrow, 10 a.m. - Federal Education Deregulation task force - Senate Hearing Room I - Watch
- Just two years after a Republican-led task force studied federal K-12 education funding, Republican lawmakers are launching a new “Federal Education Deregulation” task force to review federal K-12 funding and recommend whether programs “should be continued at the state level” if federal assistance is eliminated.
- In the current budget year, the federal government sent Tennessee $1.7 billion for K-12 public schools – the majority of which supports low-income students, children with disabilities and school meal programs.
- According to the agenda, the task force should include a “licensed educator” as a member, but that post is suspiciously still vacant the day before the task force’s first meeting.
- This task force is part of a larger Republican Party effort to destabilize public schools and privatize education. Tennessee already ranks 47th in the nation for per-pupil funding after 15 years of Republican budgets. In recent years, the GOP has enacted private school voucher scams and charter school reforms that divert public dollars away from traditional public schools to privately run institutions that don’t serve all children.
- The law authorizing this committee requires the task force to submit a report on its findings by December 31, 2025. The report will “identify all federal funding” allocated to the Department of Education and school districts in this state and consider whether the programs or resources provided using the federal funding “should be continued at the state level if the federal funding is eliminated.”
Brandon J. Puttbrese
Senate Democratic Press Secretary