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regulations
Warren, Jayapal Introduce Bill Aimed at Curbing Corporate Meddling in Regulations
“While Donald Trump keeps selling away influence over our government, we’re fighting to ensure the rules are being written to help working Americans, not corporate interests," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Nov 19, 2025
Two progressive Democrats are teaming up to push legislation to curb corporate America's capture of the federal government's regulatory process.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday announced a new bill called the Experts Protect Effective Rules, Transparency, and Stability (EXPERTS) Act that aims to restore the role of subject matter experts in federal rulemaking.
Specifically, the bill would codify the Chevron doctrine, a 40-year legal precedent overturned last year by the US Supreme Court, which held that courts should be broadly deferential to decisions made by independent regulatory agencies about interpretations of congressional statutes.
The legislation would also push for more transparency by requiring the disclosure of funding sources for all "scientific, economic, and technical studies" that are submitted to agencies to influence the rulemaking process.
Additionally, the bill proposes speeding up the regulatory process by both "excluding private parties from using the negotiated rulemaking process" and reinstating a six-year limit for outside parties to file legal challenges to agencies' decisions.
In touting the legislation, the Democrats pitched it as a necessary tool to rein in corporate power.
“Many Americans are taught in civics classes that Congress passes a law and that’s it, but the reality is that any major legislation enacted must also be implemented and enforced by the executive branch to become a reality,” said Jayapal. “We are seeing the Trump administration dismantle systems created to ensure that federal regulation prioritizes public safety. At a time when corporations and CEOs have outsized power, it is critical that we ensure that public interest is protected. This bill will level the playing field to ensure that laws passed actually work for the American people."
Warren, meanwhile, argued that "giant corporations and their armies of lobbyists shouldn’t get to manipulate how our laws are implemented," and said that "while Donald Trump keeps selling away influence over our government, we’re fighting to ensure the rules are being written to help working Americans, not corporate interests."
The proposal earned an enthusiastic endorsement from Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert, who described it as "the marquee legislation to improve our regulatory system."
"The bill aims directly at the corporate capture of our rulemaking process, brings transparency to the regulatory review process and imposes a $250,000 fine on corporations that submit false information, among other things," she said. "The bill is essential law for the future of our health, safety, environment, and workers. Public Citizen urges swift passage in both chambers."
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Trump Calls for GOP to Ram Through AI Regulation Ban in Must-Pass Military Spending Bill
"If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence," said one consumer advocate.
Nov 19, 2025
A Republican push to stop state legislatures from regulating artificial intelligence, including chatbots that have been found to pose harm to children, resoundingly failed over the summer, with 99 out of 100 senators voting against the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—but the previous rejection of the idea isn't stopping President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers from trying again to impose a moratorium.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that House Republicans should take action against "overregulation by the States" in the AI field.
Claiming that "DEI ideology" in AI models in some states will "undermine this Major Growth 'Engine'" and that "Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the 'HOTTEST' in the World"—despite tech industry leaders' warnings that the value of AI investments may have been wildly overestimated and the bubble may be on the cusp of bursting—Trump called on Republicans to include the state regulations ban in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "or pass a separate Bill."
Also on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Punchbowl News that the GOP is considering adding language to the NDAA that would effectively ban state AI regulations, which have been passed in both Democratic- and Republican-led states. Those laws would be nullified if Republicans follow through with the plan.
Since the annual defense spending bill is considered a must-pass package by many lawmakers, inserting amendments related to other legislative goals is a common strategy used in Congress.
Trump previously tried to circumvent Congress' rejection of the moratorium in July, when he announced his AI Action Plan.
Emphasizing that the anti-regulatory effort has been rejected by "an alliance of Democrats, Republicans, social conservatives, parents rights groups, medical professionals, and child online protection groups," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday called Trump's renewal of the push "highly inappropriate" and said it "would risk stripping away vital civil rights, consumer protection, and safety authority from states without putting any federal guardrails in place."
JB Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said that "AI preemption strips away the safeguards states have enacted to address the very real harms of AI."
"Big Tech and its allies have spent months trying to ban states from protecting their own residents, all while refusing to support any meaningful federal AI safeguards," said Branch. "Congress should reject this maneuver outright. If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence.”
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on "AI Chatbot Advantages and Disadvantages," where one witness, psychologist Marlynn Wei, warned that "AI chatbots endorse users 50% more than humans would on ill-advised behaviors."
In September, several grieving parents testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that their children had died by suicide after being encouraged to take their own lives by AI chatbots.
At Tuesday's hearing, Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said that "Congress must be sure to allow states to put in place safeguards that protect their residents."
"There is no reason for Congress to stop states from regulating the harms of AI when Congress has not yet passed a similar law," he said.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) also addressed the issue, suggesting it was surprising that the Republican members would bother holding a hearing on the harms of AI when they are planning to strip state lawmakers of their ability to protect their constituents from those harms.
"I'm having real difficulty in reconciling this hearing and all that we've heard about the risks of AI chatbots, especially to our children, with the attempt by the House Republican leadership to ban state-level AI regulations," said Trahan. "Republicans' push for this regressive, unconstitutional, and widely condemned AI policy is real and it's unrelenting."
👀MUST WATCH: @RepLoriTrahan takes down House GOP’s efforts to slip the disastrous AI preemption into the NDAA — wiping out state laws that protect kids, seniors, and veterans. It’s a big handout for Big Tech. pic.twitter.com/8NxdkcDgul
— The Tech Oversight Project (@Tech_Oversight) November 18, 2025
"Let's just say in public what you are pushing in private," she added. "Don't be holding these hearings about the risks of AI chatbots while behind closed doors you kneecap state legislatures from protecting their constituents. I mean, if the AI moratorium is the topic in the speaker's office let's make it so in this hearing room, because the American people deserve to know where you truly stand on AI regulation."
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Groups Warn Trump Executive Orders Would Spike Cancers Caused by Exposure to Nuclear Radiation
A letter implored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power."
Nov 14, 2025
A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people's "suffering as the price of nuclear expansion," said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.
More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC's Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.
"NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level," reads the letter.
In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC "roundly rejected" a petition "to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year."
The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.
"Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.
"Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls "face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood."
Despite the risks to some of the country's most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of "the basis of the NRC regulation," reads Friday's letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.
The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump's executive orders calls for "an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not 'count' or be considered as to have not occurred."
The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are "based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer," reads the letter. "The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure."
Trump's orders "would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model," it adds.
The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on "Reference Man"—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.
“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies," reads the letter. "Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that "radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
The groups emphasized that "executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act."
Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, "should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests."
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