Could stock trading ban for Congress get new life in Trump era?

Justin Papp, Tribune News Service

Zach Nunn’s military background tells him that success in any given mission requires an understanding of the battle-space — and in the fight to ban congressional stock trading, it will always “be stacked against” those urging change, the Iowa Republican and Air Force Reserve colonel said. Members who trade stocks may not be eager to stop, but with Donald Trump coming back to the White House, Nunn hopes momentum could shift. “We are now working on building a bipartisan coalition of members. But this is also something the president wants,” he said, after introducing his own proposal last week alongside Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. “And that has been, I think, the difference here. We now have an administration which is very focused on getting transparency and accountability.”

It’s a rosy take on an issue that has withered repeatedly in Congress, even as polling shows it has overwhelming public support. The call to ban members from trading or owning individual stocks — and to address the perception of insider trading — has grown louder since the COVID-19 pandemic, when lawmakers made a series of dubious trades that prompted a federal investigation. A bipartisan agreement advanced out of a Senate committee last July, but it didn’t get tacked on to any year-end package and never got a vote on the floor. In the 117th Congress, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, pledged to bring legislation on the topic to the House floor for a vote, then reneged. This time around, could Trump be the X factor?

“I think that we could have a perfect storm of positive factors. Having Trump support this is certainly helpful,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., who this week introduced a bill with Texas Republican Chip Roy that would require members, their spouses and dependent children to place certain assets in a blind trust. A version of the bill introduced last Congress — then led by former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va. — garnered 80 cosponsors. President Joe Biden said in December that he supports a ban on congressional stock trading, though his announcement came in the dwindling days of his presidency and only once the effort in the 118th Congress was effectively dead.

Trump has not definitively weighed in on the topic. He did call for the end of “members of Congress getting rich by trading stocks on insider information” during a 2022 speech kicking off his presidential campaign. Members trading on insider information is already illegal under federal law, though many complain that legislation Congress passed in 2012 did little to curb the problem, despite new transparency requirements. Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment on whether he supported efforts to strengthen existing law and ban members from trading altogether. Some congressional advocates of a ban said Trump could be influential. “I think his support would be very meaningful,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., long a thorn in the side of Senate leadership on the stock trading issue. Hawley helped lead the bipartisan group last Congress whose bill advanced out of committee, along with Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.

Others said they planned to broach the subject with Trump soon.

“When I see him I’m going to bring this up to him,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said on Tuesday. “This will be one of the first things I talk to him about. If he wants to drain the swamp, this is Exhibit A of how to do it.” The Pennsylvania Republican introduced legislation with Reps. Cory Mills, R-Fla., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., after leading a similar push in the 118th Congress. It would bar members, their spouses and dependents from trading individual stocks and require them to sell such assets or place them in a qualified blind trust, while opening violators up to civil suits and fines up to $50,000. Nunn, meanwhile, said he’d discussed congressional stock trading with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, leaders of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an outside task force whose main charge is to reduce government spending. Ramaswamy, for one, during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination argued politicians shouldn’t be able to trade individual stocks.

“I’ve talked to DOGE about this. We’ve had conversations with Elon and Vivek. I think these are important things that they want to be able to shine a bright light on,” Nunn said. “I’ve teed this up for them as one of the areas we really want to highlight.” Even if Trump and DOGE were to come out strongly in support, the path remains murky, in part because there’s a lot of money on the table.

Unusual Whales, a platform that tracks congressional stock trades, released a report earlier this month suggesting that congressional traders on average beat the market, with some members coming out ahead by large margins. And support from leadership remains elusive. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has not publicly weighed in and, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., did not respond to a request for comment. Still, the usual suspects are vowing to press on.

“The procedural obstacles on this are substantial,” Merkley said last week. “But I’m just going to keep pushing and looking for the opportunity to make it happen.” Also complicating the matter is the sheer number of proposals introduced each Congress and their nuances. Some simply ban members of Congress from trading or owning individual stocks. Others, like the version led by Merkley, are more stringent. That bill would have extended to the president and vice president and would have prohibited blind trusts.