A Compendium of Tennessee
Cons

The deal

The 2023 Transportation Modernization Act put $3.3 billion of cash on the table and, for the first time in state history, authorized public‑private partnerships to build and operate tolled “Choice Lanes.” In August 2026 the state awarded 26 miles of I‑24 between Nashville and Murfreesboro to DriveTN — led by Spain’s Ferrovial and its toll arm Cintra, with Australia’s Transurban and France’s Tikehau Star Infrastructure. The consortium finances the $9.2 billion build. In exchange it sets and collects the tolls for fifty years.

Who pays

Every commuter, at prices the operator adjusts by demand. On comparable Virginia express lanes, peak pricing has reached $4.75 a mile — roughly $40 for a short trip. Texas terminated a concession after tolls climbed more than 160%. Tennessee’s contract runs to about 2085; the people who will pay the highest tolls under it have not been born yet.

The deal

In 2024 the legislature rewrote the franchise tax and authorized roughly $1.5 billion in refunds plus about $400 million a year in continuing cuts — acting on a letter from corporate attorneys. No court had ruled. Around 60,000 companies collected; some 16,000 took the maximum. The recipient list went up on the Department of Revenue website for exactly thirty days, and never showed what anyone actually received.

Who pays

Department of Revenue analysis obtained by reporters shows 53% of the refund dollars — about $795 million — left the state, even though 81% of eligible businesses are based in Tennessee. The dollars concentrated at the top; the small in‑state firms padded the headcount. In the same sessions, the 4% grocery tax survived intact.

The deal

The 2025 Education Freedom Scholarship Act routes about $7,300 per student to private schools — 20,000 seats and $144 million in year one, with half the seats carrying no income limit whatsoever. A 2026 bill doubles it to 40,000 seats and more than $150 million. State officials estimated roughly two‑thirds of recipients were already enrolled in private school, then declined to release the actual number.

Who pays

Public districts lose the funding; families lose the protections. Participating private schools need not administer state tests, employ certified teachers, follow state curriculum, or provide the special‑education services public schools are legally required to deliver. They may turn away students over disability, religion or LGBTQ status. A constitutional challenge was filed in Davidson County Chancery Court in November 2025.

The deal

Tennessee has levied $44.78 million in understaffing penalties against CoreCivic since 2022 — $15.4M at Hardeman County, $12.15M at Whiteville, $10.8M at Trousdale Turner, $6.3M at South Central. It then continued paying the company roughly $240 million a year and approved a $6.8 million increase. Fining a contractor and raising its pay in the same budget cycle is not oversight. It is a subscription.

Who pays

221 people died in CoreCivic‑operated Tennessee prisons between 2019 and 2022 — more than a third of all deaths across the state’s 14‑prison system, and over half of its drug‑overdose deaths. Trousdale Turner ran a 33.7% officer vacancy rate against 26% at state‑run facilities, and 146% staff turnover in a single year. The U.S. Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into conditions there.

The deal

Tennessee exempts qualified data centers from sales tax on equipment and expanded the break again in 2024. 62 facilities now operate here and 16 more are proposed. In 2026 the legislature considered six bills that would have required registration, permitting, or basic reporting on how much water and power these facilities consume. All six failed. Local governments are left writing their own moratoriums.

In South Memphis, xAI was found to have installed roughly 35 gas turbines while holding a permit for 15, next to a historically Black neighborhood already carrying the region’s worst air burden.

Who pays

Households. Data‑center demand on the TVA grid grew sevenfold between 2020 and 2025, to 8.3 million MWh — the annual consumption of 661,000 homes — with a pipeline five times that already queued. The bills tell the story better than the megawatts do.

The deal

After Sackett v. EPA stripped federal protection from isolated wetlands in 2023, Tennessee had the option to keep its own. Instead the 2025 legislature removed state permitting for most of what remained: artificial wetlands, no permit; low‑quality isolated wetlands up to one acre, no permit and no mitigation; moderate‑quality up to a quarter acre, the same. The law also bars the state from weighing cumulative impact — so a thousand quarter‑acre losses legally add up to nothing.

Who pays

The Southern Environmental Law Center estimates the law removes review from up to 80% of Tennessee’s isolated wetlands; 94% of them sit under two acres. Northwest Tennessee alone holds more than 30,000 acres. Wetlands are flood control and water filtration that no county has to fund, staff, or bond for — until they’re gone, and it has to.

The deal

The state stood up a $60 million Nuclear Energy Fund and wrote checks from it. Orano — the French state‑controlled nuclear fuel company — took $5 million from the fund, a $6 million economic development grant, and $5 million more on contingency, then received a full state and local sales‑tax waiver on its $4.5 billion Oak Ridge enrichment plant. The Fiscal Review Office could not calculate what that waiver costs Tennessee. Nobody made them.

The governor requested $92.6 million more, including $50 million toward a TVA reactor. Tennessee is now a top‑five finalist for a federal “Nuclear Lifecycle Campus”: a promised $50 billion and 25,000 jobs in exchange for consolidating the nation’s spent nuclear fuel — with no site named and no disposal path guaranteed.

Who pays

Whichever county draws it, and every county downstream and downwind. As the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy put it, the site “will become a high‑level radioactive waste dump, and this waste will likely never leave.” A legislative resolution volunteering Tennessee for the program moved with almost no public debate before it was pulled.

The deal

Age limits and potency caps were available. Instead the state moved hemp licensing to the Alcoholic Beverage Commission and banned THCA outright effective July 2026 — roughly three‑quarters of a $250 million Tennessee market built almost entirely by in‑state farmers, wholesalers and small retailers.

Who pays

Tennessee shop owners, who describe being legislated out of business, and Tennessee farmers who planted for a legal crop. And the treasury: July 2026 hemp wholesale collections came in at $425,000 against a $9.4 million projection — better than a 95% collapse in a single month, on pace to open a $110 million annual hole. The state had already cut the prior year’s hemp revenue estimate by $55 million.

The deal

63% of Tennessee voters support legal adult use (Vanderbilt Poll, December 2024). Tennessee is one of only eight states in the country with no medical cannabis program at all. A 2026 home‑grow bill died 4–3 in Senate committee — four Republicans voting no, two more abstaining rather than going on record. A separate bill moved rescheduling authority away from medical experts and gave it to the legislature itself.

Who pays

Patients with chronic pain, epilepsy, PTSD and cancer, who either drive to another state or buy from someone with no license and no lab. Tennessee just deleted its only legal cannabinoid market and declined, in the same year, to build a lawful one to replace it. That is not caution. That is a choice to keep the market illegal.

The deal

SB0527 would bar failure‑to‑warn claims against pesticide manufacturers whose labels carry EPA approval — meaning a company could know of a cancer risk, keep it off the label the EPA rubber‑stamped, and be immune in Tennessee court. Bayer, which bought Monsanto and with it Roundup, has run near‑identical bills in 17 states. Tennessee’s was deferred to 2026 rather than defeated. It is still alive.

Who pays

More than 300 Tennesseans have sued over Roundup exposure; about 100 more over paraquat. Nationally there are 170,000+ claims; Bayer paid over $10 billion to settle roughly 100,000 of them in 2020, and a Georgia jury returned a $2 billion verdict. This bill would not make Tennessee farmers safer. It would make their claims worthless.

The deal

The Jackson Law — on the books since the 1980s — lets a county or city vote to approve or reject a commercial landfill in its borders. 54 counties and 18 cities have adopted it. A state solid waste task force is now weighing how to narrow it, with the National Waste and Recycling Association and the Tennessee Chamber arguing that permitting should be “more regional” with fewer layers of local approval. “Regional” means the county you are dumping in no longer gets a vote.

Meanwhile the Tennessee Waste to Jobs Act — which would make packaging producers, not county property taxpayers, fund recycling infrastructure, exempting any business under $10 million — has stalled two sessions running.

Who pays

Rural counties, which have neither the staff nor the outside counsel to outlast a national waste company, and for whom the local vote is the only leverage that exists. Middle Tennessee’s landfills are approaching capacity; the pressure to site the next one somewhere with less money and fewer lawyers is already here.

The deal

When Tennessee moved in 2026 to regulate pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen squeezing independent pharmacies out of business — a group calling itself Shaping Healthy Initiatives for Tomorrow ran nearly $500,000 in television advertising against the bill. It is registered to a post office box in Oklahoma, linked to other political organizations, with no identifiable company behind it. Its ads praised three senators by name for “fighting” drug prices by opposing the drug‑pricing bill.

Who pays

The bill passed anyway, and CVS said it would sue. Keep the outcome in mind — and then note what it took to get there. Half a million dollars of untraceable out‑of‑state money can be aimed at a Tennessee bill, run on Tennessee television, and nobody has to sign their name to it. That is the vulnerability. This time the bill survived it.

The deal

Since 2016 the state has had to chase 71 companies that collected $169 million in FastTrack grants, promised more than 24,000 jobs, and produced about 7,400. More than $20 million is still outstanding; a 2024 audit wrote off $7.9 million as uncollectible. One firm took $3 million, created zero jobs, and its owners pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Tennessee’s development agreements — including Ford’s — are confidential by statute. The Comptroller has found that the job numbers companies self‑report “simply are not reliable.” The state does not verify what it buys, and the public is not allowed to read the contract.

Who pays

The clearest case is the largest. In 2021 the legislature approved a $900 million package for BlueOval City against 5,800 promised jobs.

The deal

This is the largest number in this entire ledger, and it is a refusal. Every year since 2014, Tennessee has declined roughly $1.4 billion in federal Medicaid expansion funds — plus a one‑time $900 million signing incentive Congress offered in 2021 to states that had held out. Thirteen years of that is a figure with a b in front of it that nobody in the Capitol wants totaled on a whiteboard.

Understand what “Washington’s money” means: it is Tennesseans’ own federal taxes. They are collected here and spent covering people in California, New York and Ohio. Tennessee pays in and opts out.

Who pays

More than 300,000 Tennesseans sit in the coverage gap — earning too much for TennCare, too little for a marketplace subsidy. There is no plan for them and never was one.

And the hospitals that treat them anyway. Tennessee has the highest rate of hospital closures per capita in the country. As of August 2026, 19 rural hospitals — 36% of the state’s total — are at risk of closing, 12 of them immediately. When a rural hospital closes, the county loses its largest employer and its labor and delivery unit in the same week, and the ambulance ride to the next town becomes the difference between a stroke you survive and one you don’t.