The House on Wednesday passed a bill placing some limits on congressional stock trading — a practice long linked to outgoing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
The Stop Insider Trading Act, introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin in January, would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from purchasing publicly traded stocks.
It would also require lawmakers to publicly disclose each intended sale of stocks at least seven days in advance to the House clerk or Senate secretary.
The penalty for a violation is $2,000 or 10% of the transaction’s value, whichever is greater, as well as the forfeiture of any realized gains from the sale.
The measure “ensures that lawmakers cannot use their position to profit off insider information they may garner while serving in Congress,” Steil said Monday.
The bill cleared the House 232 to 198, with the full support of Republicans and 13 Democrats on board.
This includes Reps. Kathy Castor of Florida, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Susie Lee of Nevada, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Darren Soto of Florida, and Derek Tran of California.
In fact, Democrats framed the bill as not going far enough, pushing for an outright ban on members of Congress from owning stocks and for those limits to also extend to the president and administration officials.
“This bill would, in fact, allow members of Congress to continue to own and trade individual stocks. The bill would let members of Congress keep every single share of stock they currently own. The bill would allow members to liquidate their holdings at any time, profiting off years of ballooning investment portfolios. There is no divestiture required under this bill, and crucially, the bill does nothing to rein in the unprecedented, absurd, and deeply offensive corruption currently taking place in the White House,” Rep. Joe Morelle of New York said earlier this week.
Thanks to the sweeping resolution, a number of high-profile lawmakers could be impacted the most if the bill were to ever become law, based on data from Quiver Quantitative, including Pelosi, who is perhaps the most notorious sitting lawmaker for lucrative stock trades.
Pelosi’s household is listed as having made $52,525,000 worth of trades over the past year, spanning 21 occasions.
“Speaker Pelosi does not own any stocks and has no knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,” her spokesperson, Ian Krager, told The New York Post.
The former speaker has publicly backed efforts to restrict congressional stock trading since 2022 after initially defending the practice.
“We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” the former House speaker told a reporter five years ago when pressed on the fortune her husband has amassed trading stocks while she’s in office.
Despite Pelosi’s decades of landing suspiciously well-timed stock trades, her fellow Democratic lawmaker from California has supplanted Pelosi.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has blown past Pelosi as Congress’s top-performing trader, posting a jaw-dropping 112.1% return over the S&P 500 from January 2024 through April 2026, according to a recent analysis by ProCap Insights.
Pelosi’s 38.5% outperformance over the same period — long considered the gold standard among lawmakers — isn’t even close.
Pelosi, meanwhile, is still very active on the market and pocketing millions. She entered 2026 with call options on Alphabet, Amazon, and Nvidia, and has a long-term track record that InsiderFinance puts at a 155.5% total return since 2014 across 211 trades.