The stage is in battleground Pennsylvania. The stakes are control of the House.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday will unveil the party's Fighting for an Affordable America agenda, as he kicks off 100 days until the midterm elections and works to focus voter attention ahead of November.
In Pennsylvania's 7th District, tucked in the Lehigh Valley, Jeffries and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, are rallying support for Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter trying to unseat the incumbent Republican congressman as Democrats reach for the House majority.
Jeffries, D-N.Y., said the goal is “making clear to the American people that we're focused on lowering the cost of groceries and gas and housing, we're committed to a country that provides affordable heath care for every American.”
Down the road, Brooks’ rival, freshman GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, is launching his own 100-day out event.
It's a symbolic start to a campaign season that's been well underway for much of a tumultuous year that's included partisan redistricting battles, contentious primaries in both parties and weighty Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance.
Midterm elections are often a referendum on the party in power, and the contests are set against the second term of President Donald Trump, whose military action against Iran and economic policies backed by the Republican majority in Congress are reshaping the political landscape.
“We gotta win the midterms,” Trump said during a visit last month to a Mack Truck plant in the district, where he promoted Mackenzie's candidacy.
Trump has made a number of visits to competitive states as GOP candidates rely on the power of the presidency to propel their campaigns. Last week he was in Georgia, a key state with a marquee Senate race, and he has a trip to battleground Michigan coming up.
While the president voices support for rank-and-file Republicans during his rallies, he also devotes much of his time on stage to a wide range of issues including the U.S.-Mexico border, opposing transgender rights and criticizing judges.
Republicans are hoping the president's signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of tax breaks and spending cuts, along with a measure the House passed recently aiming to limit lawmaker stock trading, will buoy them with voters.
But they're up against a historical trend that sees the president's party lose seats in midterm elections and confronting the unpopularity of the war with Iran.
Democrats are aiming to seize on voter disapproval of the war and refocus attention back to kitchen table issues like higher costs and gas prices to propel them to wins in the narrowly divided House.
Even though 435 House seats are being contested this fall, control of the House is often determined by just a handful of competitive districts. Fewer than 20 seats are among the most watched, what analysts call genuine toss-ups.
Pennsylvania's 7th District is a key battleground along with contests elsewhere in the state, reflecting significant political weight not just as a presidential swing state but as the pathway to a House majority. Democrats are also targeting House contests in Pennsylvania's 1st, 8th and 10th districts — all seats controlled by Republicans.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is preparing to embark on his own cross-country trip to fund-raise for the GOP and stump for Republican candidates as he works to retain his majority.
Republicans have a cash edge over Democrats in the race for House control. A question hovering over the election is how the Supreme Court's June ruling affecting campaign finance could play out, with national parties now able to make direct contributions to candidate campaigns.
Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters ahead of an address by President Donald Trump, Thursday, July 16, 2026, at the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to eliminate a foundational safety principle that has for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to and that has been adopted around the world.
Currently, facilities such as nuclear plants, hospitals or academic institutions that use radioactive materials must ensure radiation exposures are kept “as low as reasonably achievable” — the ALARA principle. The NRC proposal would abandon that philosophy while keeping a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure.
The two standards have worked together in radiation safety. Dose limits set the maximum amount of radiation the public and radiation workers can be exposed to, while ALARA kept radiation exposure as low as practical under those limits. Research shows radiation exposure increases a person’s chance of getting cancer, a risk that increases as the dose increases.
The dose limits are not changing. But the NRC, which regulates civilian nuclear energy technologies and radioactive materials, now wants to replace ALARA with a “graded approach” that includes several actions facilities must take depending on the potential dose of radiation to workers. More rigorous radiation protection measures would be required when approaching dose limits to ensure they aren't exceeded.
This comes as President Donald Trump attempts to quadruple domestic nuclear energy production because of surging electricity demand amid a data center and artificial intelligence boom. Reforming the NRC is one way Trump is trying to speed up nuclear reactor development. He instructed the federal agency in an executive order last year to “ adopt science-based radiation limits.”
The Energy Department, which oversees national energy policies, has already stopped using ALARA. The NRC expects to finalize its radiation protection regulations in the coming months.
NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said the commission is not lowering the bar on safety.
“We’re just removing the ambiguity,” he said in a call with reporters. “But the standard for exposure to workers and the public, those are not changing. We’re just putting in place greater clarification.”
Nieh doesn't expect major changes within the nation's existing fleet of large, traditional reactors. But companies designing and building new, smaller reactors could move faster with a clearer picture of the radiation protection requirements, he said.
The NRC said radiation exposure limits are set well below levels associated with health effects, and it expects remaining standards and industry practices to keep radiation doses far below the limits. There's incentive to do so — it's more expensive and time-consuming to work in areas with higher radiation because access must be restricted and more surveys are required.
The nuclear industry's trade association agrees with the NRC.
“We will always continue to look at what can we do to reduce the dose to workers, and maintain our doses to the off-site public as low as possible,” said Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “It’s not like we’re just going to throw open the doors and let everything run up to the limits.”
ALARA created a “moving target” for regulation, said Justin Friedman, a nuclear energy consultant who previously spent three decades at the U.S. Department of State. Getting rid of the rule would allow NRC scientists to make more rational decisions about appropriate levels of manageable risk, he added.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, cautions that some parts of the NRC proposal could raise permissible radiation doses in certain cases, while still staying below the cap. Lyman highlighted a proposed revision to radionuclide emissions standards, in particular.
Radiation exposure to the general public is limited to 100 millirem per year. A typical dose of radiation from a chest X-ray is 10 millirem.
The NRC wants to increase its radionuclide emissions standards from a conservative 10 millirem per year dose to 25 millirem per year, based on a hypothetical person living in a house at the property line for a nuclear plant.
The NRC says actual doses to the public would remain far lower because, in reality, people live farther from nuclear sites and benefit from dispersion in air and water.
The NRC should improve, rather than eliminate, ALARA, Lyman said, to protect the public and workers. ALARA has become a political target because some people mistakenly believe radiation exposures have to be as low as possible no matter the cost, Lyman said. In reality, it allows tradeoffs.
Katy Huff, a former U.S. assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said in some cases, the requirement may be challenging to regulate. Additional clarity would improve the regulatory environment without harming the public, added Huff, a professor and department chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
However, Huff said, she thought the NRC was going to clarify what reasonable means in ALARA without scrapping it. She said she’s open to being convinced the graded approach will be just as effective.
The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, chartered by Congress to provide independent scientific guidance, has not formally weighed in yet. Council president Kathryn Higley said she personally likes some things in the 180-page document and thinks others are problematic.
The NRC should look at the whole picture for managing risk, she said. For instance, if a worker at a nuclear power plant were to enter an area where airborne radioactive materials are present, in keeping with ALARA, they might wear full personal protective equipment with respirators, said Higley, professor emeritus at Oregon State University. That makes them move slower, potentially subjecting them to heat stress that could hurt them more than a low dose of radioactivity, she said.
A concern with the proposal, Higley said, is that it maintains the current occupational dose limit for adult radiation workers at 5 rem, or 5,000 millirem, per year. With ALARA in place, the average dose to workers has been well below that cap.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends an occupational dose of 2 rem per year on average. The NRC previously found it wasn't justified to match that, because workers were exposed to less than that and changing regulations is costly.
Higley said the U.S. may need to align with the international community if ALARA is going away.
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FILE - The four nuclear reactors and cooling towers operate at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, May 31, 2024, in Waynesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump holds an executive order regarding reinvigorating the nuclear industrial base in the Oval Office of the White House, May 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
FILE - Cooling tower three with one and two in the background operate at the nuclear reactor facility at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, May 31, 2024, in Waynesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)
