The House is expected to vote Wednesday on a bill that would place restrictions on stock trading by members of Congress after clearing a key procedural hurdle Tuesday afternoon.
This would be the first time the full House has voted on legislation to limit lawmakers’ ability to trade individual stocks — House Democrats torpedoed a promising effort in 2022 — although the legislation doesn’t go as far as some lawmakers and advocates would like.
House Republicans also added language from another bill that would require voters to present photo identification to cast a ballot, one of President Donald Trump’s top legislative priorities.
Even if the House passes the stock-trading bill, the legislation faces dim prospects in the Senate, which has not yet scheduled a vote on a separate bill that would prevent members of Congress and their families — as well as the president and vice president — from owning and trading individual stocks altogether.
Trending
“We have a whole list of things that we’re going to talk about on how to prioritize, because it takes a lot more time in the Senate to get things done,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), the Senate Republican whip, told reporters.
The House bill, called the Stop Insider Trading Act, would prevent members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from buying new individual stocks. But, critically, it does not prevent lawmakers or their families from owning them.
Instead, the Stop Insider Trading Act allows lawmakers to continue to hold their existing stock and would require them to publicly disclose plans to sell their stock at least between seven and 14 days in advance. The bill also increases fines for lawmakers who run afoul of the law to $2,000 or 10% of the offending transaction, whichever is greater.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has personally backed it.
Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisconsin), who chairs the committee that advanced the bill in January, told the House Rules Committee on Monday that the bill “ensures that lawmakers cannot use their position to profit off insider information they may garner while serving in Congress.”
“The legislation, I believe, is critical to restoring public trust in this institution,” Steil said.
Public disclosures filed under the existing Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, which became law in 2012, “lacked detail” and can be filed one month after the transaction, Steil added. (And, as NOTUS has reported, lawmakers frequently fail to disclose stock trades within that timeline.)
But critics say the bill does nothing to limit lawmakers’ ability to take official actions that might benefit the stocks they already own, thus failing to reduce public perception that lawmakers are profiting off their position.
“When lawmakers own stock in companies impacted by their official decisions or committee assignments, people naturally question whether policy choices are being made for the public good or to increase the value of private holdings,” Eric Kashdan, the director of federal advocacy at Campaign Legal Center, wrote in a letter to House members Monday. “Even if financial gain is not a specific member’s motivation, the appearance of the conflict will persist until reforms are enacted.”
Campaign Legal Center and other ethics watchdogs supported a bipartisan bill introduced last fall by lawmakers including Reps. Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida).
The bill, dubbed the Restore Trust in Congress Act, would have barred members of Congress and their families from trading stocks. The authors of the original bipartisan compromise are less than thrilled with the Stop Insider Trading Act.
“House Republicans are pushing a voter suppression bill that will upend mail-in-voting and throw the elections into chaos, and are trying to trick members into supporting it by linking it to a partial stock trading ban that falls short of the full Congressional stock trading ban that the American people want,” Magaziner wrote in a statement to NOTUS.
Roy told reporters Monday that although he would prefer stronger protections around stock trading, the Stop Insider Trading Act still represents significant progress in holding lawmakers accountable.
“I worked in good faith with Bryan Steil to put that together as an approach that we thought we could rally around,” Roy said. “It would be a giant step forward to say that you can literally not buy any equities whatsoever. I think that’s a huge deal.”
Nearly a year ago, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced its own bipartisan bill sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (D-Missouri).
But the bill, called the Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions Act, or HONEST Act, has languished, and leadership has yet to schedule a vote on it. Barrasso said that Hawley’s bill is on leadership’s radar, but he added that the upper chamber has a number of other priorities ahead of the August recess.
The stock-ban bill is “always something [Hawley] has been pushing,” Barrasso said.
Hawley told NOTUS that although he prefers his own bill to the House measure, he’s open to supporting any legislation that could help curb stock trading in Congress –– especially if it has better odds in the Senate.
“The House bill is not nearly as robust as I would like it, but something is better than nothing,” Hawley said. “I think that’s moving the ball forward –– I hope they’ll pass it. It’s just a matter of what we can get passed.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) who chairs the Senate’s homeland security committee and opposed Hawley’s bill, told NOTUS he hasn’t reviewed the House measure to see if he’d support it.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan), the top Democrat on the committee, also told NOTUS he hasn’t looked closely at how the House stock-ban bill compares to Hawley’s Senate bill. But Peters said he thinks any movement on a stock-trading bill is good.
Senate Democrats are still trying to move the HONEST Act, Peters added, but continue to struggle with the legislative calendar. The Senate has just about 10 weeks worth of session left this year amid the 2026 midterm elections on Nov. 3.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska), who is sponsoring the Stop Insider Trading Act in the Senate, told NOTUS that although he feels good about the legislation’s chances in the upper chamber, he’s aware the Senate’s legislative calendar “will be part of the challenge.”
“It’s a commonsense piece of legislation that will help restore people’s faith in the Senate. So I believe we can get the votes,” Ricketts said.
This story has been corrected to reflect that the Stop Insider Trading Act does not include language requiring voters show proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Authors
