Lawmakers said they wanted to rein in their own stock trading. What happened?

WASHINGTON — For a brief moment, it seemed like a bill to curb stock trading by members of Congress could see a vote in the House.

Blessed by GOP leadership with hopes of a floor vote in the first quarter of the year, it would have been a victory for the small group of Republicans leading the charge. But that time frame has come and gone, with both chambers now out of town for a two-week recess.

“That’s frustrating that we’re not moving it, and the leadership knows that, and we’re pressing it,” said Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who has been backing the effort.

Even after earning a mention in President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year, the clock kept ticking as the supposed deadline for a floor vote crept up.

“Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay,” Trump said in February.

It wasn’t the first time a president used their annual address to Congress to draw attention to the appearance of insider trading.

“Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress; I will sign it tomorrow,” then-president Barack Obama said in his address to Congress in January 2012.

What’s known as the STOCK Act was reintroduced two days later and signed into law on April 4, 2012, though critics say the reporting requirements it imposed did little to clean up Congress’ image.

‘A paper tiger’

Lawmakers today are technically barred from insider trading and must disclose their transactions within 45 days. But they’re still allowed to freely trade stocks, even as they view classified information and make policy decisions that can move markets.

That can erode public trust, ethics experts say, especially when they buy or sell right before earth-shaking events, like the COVID-19 pandemic or Trump’s tariff announcements.

Many lawmakers have resisted the idea of a total stock ownership ban, saying it would strip them of an important source of income. The Republican-led bill was designed to appease those skeptics, allowing members to keep their existing portfolios.

The measure would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from buying new individual stocks and require them to give advance notice before selling ones they already own.

That’s still not enough, some say.

“It’s basically a paper tiger. It’s not an actual congressional stock trading ban. It’s riddled with loopholes. So it wouldn’t actually solve the problem,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of policy and government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight.

Last year, momentum had been building for a much stricter idea.

A bipartisan working group — including Roy and Reps. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I.; Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Tim Burchett, R-Tenn.; and others — proposed what they dubbed the Restore Trust in Congress Act. That consensus proposal would ban members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks and would require current members of Congress to offload stocks within 180 days of enactment.

Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna vowed to put pressure on leadership, filing a discharge petition to try to bring the bill to the floor. But her petition had just 82 signers as of this week, and the group’s united front began to crumble with this year’s midterm elections closing in.

GOP leaders won over agitators on the Republican side with the promise of action on the milder so-called Stop Insider Trading Act, with Luna saying she was assured a floor vote within the first quarter of 2026, which just ended.

“I’m still hearing that it will be coming up shortly,” Luna said in an interview Monday.

Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil, chair of the House Administration Committee and lead sponsor of the GOP push, said while he was unaware of any first-quarter promise, he was still optimistic. The bill was marked up by his panel in January and has 93 co-sponsors, including two Democrats — Reps. Josh Riley of New York and Ed Case of Hawaii.

“I think there’s other things that have come and taken precedence for leadership, but leadership will make the play call as to when is the best time,” Steil said.

Luna said her current strategy is to keep applying “pressure and pain” to leadership, without elaborating.

“Obviously, it’s not the first time that they’ve blown anything. This seems to be a big issue, not just on the Republican side, but on (the) Democrat side too,” Luna said.

Competing efforts

But Democrats have remained skeptical.

“Respectfully, Speaker Johnson hasn’t seen a deadline he’s not willing to burst through,” said House Administration ranking member Joseph D. Morelle, D-N.Y.

Morelle does not support the GOP-led bill and has instead thrown his weight behind an alternate Democratic proposal that would ban stock trading not just for members of Congress, but for the president and vice president as well. That proposal, sponsored by Magaziner, has become a rallying cry for Democrats as they try to put attention on Trump’s own business dealings.

Hedtler-Gaudette said their competing effort halted any real shot of passing a stock trading ban and served to “undercut and undermine” the consensus bill.

“(The consensus bill) was getting co-sponsors, and it was very bipartisan,” he said. “Democratic leadership, for political and electoral reasons, basically decided to blow that up and try to write their own vehicle that they know isn’t going to pass, because they expanded it to include the president and vice president.”

Luna has likewise blamed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., for the downfall of the consensus bill. “We could have technically already had the votes, if he would have just stayed the course.”

Meanwhile, Magaziner tossed the blame to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

“I don’t want to speak for Luna and Chip Roy, but I am confident that they would tell you that their preference is for a full ban like the consensus bill that we had,” he said. “The only reason they agreed to this watered-down version is because they thought that Mike Johnson would accept it, and now the fact that Johnson is waffling even on that says a lot more about Mike Johnson than it does about the support for a stock trading ban in the House.”

Still, finger-pointing aside, it’s not clear whether there’s enough appetite for change among House members, with some privately acknowledging that stock profits are a touchy subject. And on the other side of the Capitol, a Senate version of Steil’s bill was introduced on March 18 by Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., but no markup has been scheduled yet.

“The Senate is absolutely, just totally incompetent, so it’s not up to the Senate. It’s up to, really, the White House in championing it,” Luna said.

Roy said time is running out in the current Congress to put his colleagues on the record.

“Time’s ticking … so we need to see some movement and a vote. And if they want to put it on the floor and they want to vote against it, go ahead. Stop hiding,” Roy said.

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