Washington is considering new legislative efforts to limit congressional stock trading, which would be the first significant reform to address conflicts of interest in more than a decade.
Both chambers of Congress are working to ban stock trading. A bipartisan group of House lawmakers, led by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Seth Magaziner (D-RI), announced its latest proposal on Wednesday.
“If you want to day trade, leave Congress,” Roy said Wednesday at a press conference announcing the legislation. “It’s that simple. If you come up here with the trust of the American people, do your job, vote to deliver for the American people.”
The bill, which would ban members, their spouses, and dependent children from individual stock trading, combines several pieces of legislation that have been introduced in the lower chamber. The legislation would force lawmakers to sell all individual stocks within 180 days after the bill is enacted. New members of Congress would also be required to divest their individual stock holdings after swearing in.
Members who violate the ban would have to pay a penalty equal to 10% of the value of the stock.
But the renewed push to ban stock trading on Capitol Hill comes at a busy time in the House, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) balancing GOP frustration over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., takeover, and a looming government shutdown.
And Johnson also has a clock ticking on bringing the legislation, called the Restore Trust in Congress Act, to the House floor. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) threatened to introduce a discharge petition on the issue at the end of September if he doesn’t do so — the same time government funding is set to lapse unless the lower chamber passes a short-term funding patch, or Congress passes all 12 of its appropriations bills.
“We’ve asked nicely for leadership to put this on the floor. If they don’t, I’m saying timeline is end of month. There is a discharge petition prepared and ready to go,” Luna said at the Wednesday press conference.
In the Senate, a bill led by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Gary Peters (D-MI), called the HONEST Act, was passed out of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in mid-July. However, it’s unclear whether the legislation will receive floor time, as Hawley was the sole GOP vote in the committee to advance the bill.
Support from leadership and White House gives movement hope
Playing in the lawmakers’ favor has been recent support from both parties’ leadership, as well as the White House, with Trump saying he would “absolutely” sign a ban. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also expressed support.
Concerns over congressional stock trading have mounted in recent years. The last significant legislation on the issue was the 2012 passage of the STOCK Act, which required lawmakers to catalog trades over $1,000 in public reports within 45 days or face a $200 fine.
Despite the passage of the STOCK Act, however, allegations of insider trading have persisted in Congress. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), an FBI agent before his time in Congress and one of the main sponsors of the legislation, said coming to the Capitol “confirmed what I already knew, that members of Congress have access to inside information, period. End of story.”
Over the past year, 130 politicians have engaged in stock trading, according to Capitol Trades.
Among those is freshman Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), whose stock trades have landed him in hot water since he was sworn into Congress in January. Bresnahan, from a purple district in Pennsylvania, is one of the members who had previously introduced a stock measure. But he has also become one of the Hill’s most active stock traders despite pledging on the campaign trail to work to ban the practice.
Hannah Pope, a spokeswoman for Bresnahan, told the Washington Examiner that the congressman and his team have reached out to co-sponsor the Restore Trust in Congress Act.
House GOP and Democratic leaders, including Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), have expressed support for a ban. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), whose husband’s stock trades have been heavily scrutinized, pledged to support the legislation after the Senate committee’s passage of Hawley’s legislation, previously named the PELOSI Act.
“If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it — no matter what they decide to name it,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, from the watchdog group called the Project on Government Oversight, described the support from Congress, leadership, and the White House as an “alignment of the stars” on Capitol Hill.
“We’ve got a real moment for it to happen,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “It’s up to Congress now to finally, kind of act and deliver on this, on this issue and promises that have been made by a lot of members over the years. So now’s the time to do it.”
Still, it’s unclear when or how legislation on banning stock trading will come to the floor in either chamber for a vote. While Roy favors going through regular order to bring the legislation to the floor, Luna’s threat to bring a discharge petition could be another avenue.
Regardless, the bipartisan group of House lawmakers, which includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Tim Burchett (R-TN), was adamant that the legislation would be heard on the House floor.
Should he bring the measure to the House floor, Johnson is also walking a fine line. He would risk raising the ire of members who don’t support a ban, whose arguments he acknowledged while speaking to Punchbowl News earlier this week.
“I have always favored the ban, but I’ve never aggressively pushed it, because I respect the views of other people on the subject,” Johnson said. “I understand the concerns about it, but I also know that because our salary was frozen a long time ago, a lot of people rely upon that outside income to pay for their kids’ colleges and other necessities.”
Johnson continued, “So you don’t want to put greater deterrence for good people to run for Congress, and that’s a concern I have — all of us on both sides of the aisle for candidate recruitment. So it’s a tough issue.”
Concerns about candidate recruitment if stock trading is banned were forcibly rebuked by Luna, who said the “notion that you’re somehow sacrificing your financial benefit to be up here, first and foremost, if that’s what’s incentivizing you to run for office, you are definitely the wrong person to be here.”
“And so my thoughts on those people is if you want to trade stocks, go to Wall Street,” she said. “Don’t go to Congress.”
Difference between House and Senate efforts
A key difference between the House-led measure and the Senate bill is whether or not the president and vice president are included in the ban, an issue that would have to be reconciled between the two chambers should either put a measure on the floor for a vote.
Hedtler-Gaudette, of the government watchdog group, applauded the bill, saying it was “smart” of the members to keep their efforts focused on the legislative branch.
“It’s extremely encouraging to see both the Senate and the House sort of moving concretely toward finally passing a stock trading ban,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “It’s been kind of odd that Congress hasn’t done it to this point … certainly it’s not surprising. It would be significant kind of restriction that Congress would be placing on itself, but it’s a restriction that they need to place on themselves in order to have any hope of, sort of restoring public trust in Congress.”
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Roy and Magaziner confirmed that they were in contact with their Senate counterparts during the drafting of their legislation, with the Democratic representative noting that any measure passed in the House would still need to garner 60 votes in the Senate.
Hawley called the House’s version of banning stock trading “really strong,” telling the Washington Examiner Thursday that while he needed to look into the legislation for differences more closely, it is “pretty darn close to what we passed out” of the Senate committee.
David Sivak contributed to this report.
