Join us for a reading and Q&A with Sandeep Vaheesan, author of Democracy in Power, a book that examines the past, present, and promise of rural electric cooperatives and publicly owned utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority—how we created them, how they perform today, and how we can perfect and expand them.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute.

In his scholarship, advocacy work, and popular commentary, he has focused on, among other topics, the latent statutory powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He has laid out how the FTC can strengthen antitrust rules governing corporations and prohibit a range of unfair competitive practices. Building on this work, in March 2019, he and his colleagues at the Open Markets Institute spearheaded a petition that called on the FTC to prohibit non-compete clauses. In a 2021 executive order, President Biden asked for FTC regulatory action to restrict employers’ use of non-competes. The FTC enacted a rule in April 2024 banning non-compete clauses for all workers.

Vaheesan is the author of the book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. The book examines the past, present, and promise of rural electric cooperatives and publicly owned utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority—how we created them, how they perform today, and how we can perfect and expand them.