A potentially seismic shift in ethics regulation across the three branches of federal government is brewing, thanks to the recent surge of bipartisan support for legislation banning congressional stock trading. The Restore Trust in Congress Act was introduced in the House on September 3, 2025, and has more than eighty co-sponsors in favor of prohibiting lawmakers from owning and trading stocks in individual companies.
This ban would abandon the cliché notion that sunlight is the best disinfectant, replacing the soft touch of transparency with the hard hammer of prohibition. That shift may influence future waves of government-wide ethics reforms, which seem inevitable given this administration’s many corruption scandals and the corresponding need to rebuild public trust and government ethics institutions.
To mitigate conflicts of interest, ethics reform frameworks typically adopt one of three regulatory strategies—disclosure requirements, conduct limitations, or categorical prohibitions—each reflecting a distinct theory of compliance and accountability. One of the last major prohibitions passed was the congressional honoraria ban in the Ethics Reform Act of 1989. Since then, however, Congress’s remedy of choice has been increased disclosure, which can be seen over the last thirty years of major legislative ethics reforms like the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, and the STOCK Act of 2012. The general two-part rationale for using the disclosure remedy in ethics is that it (1) builds public trust that officials cannot hide conflicts of interest and enables informed voters to hold them accountable for unethical activity; and (2) deters officials from engaging in activities that give even the appearance of impropriety in a public disclosure.
But congressional stock trading disclosures turn this rationale on its head. The STOCK Act, which created a new requirement for officials to publicly report their stock trades within forty-five days of the transaction, intended to increase public trust in Congress by giving Americans an inside look into the financial interests of their lawmakers. This law was an overwhelming failure in two ways.
I. Confidence in Congressional Corruption
First, transparency into the true volume of members’ stock trades reinforced the public’s perception that Congress is corrupt and therefore damaged public trust. Consider the prospectus of a proposed ETF called the Tuttle Capital Government Grift ETF (GRFT). The fund’s principal strategy “is grounded in the belief that political actors—particularly members of the U.S. Congress and individuals closely associated with the President—can influence market outcomes or possess information that materially affects security pricing.” And GRFT identifies “legislation or regulation . . . that limits, restricts or prevents United States Congresspersons and/or their spouses from personal securities trading” as a key risk to its strategy. Investors who study congressional stock trade disclosures confidently conclude that the investments are a rational money-making strategy dependent on corrupt Members of Congress and thus do not generate public trust.
The GRFT ETF is part of a larger trend and is not one-of-a-kind. It attempts to replicate the proven strategy of two other ETFs that track congressional stock trades. The NANC ETF, which tracks stock trades of congressional Democrats, had a 73% return on investment since its inception in 2023 to August 2025, compared to Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF’s 61% return on investment during the same time period. The GOP ETF tracks the stock trades of congressional Republicans and had a 41% return during that time. The takeaway is that not only has disclosure not increased public trust, but also that investors are betting on the untrustworthiness of Congress.
II. No Shame in the Stock Game
Second, the STOCK Act did not deter members from trading stocks, even for the most apparently corrupt trades. For example, trades predictably attract media attention when Members of Congress are debating responses to global events that steer the financial markets. And yet, during the first three months of the global pandemic in 2020, House and Senate members reported approximately 1,600 stock trades valued up to a total of nearly $160 million while they considered legislation on which industries would receive government support during the crisis. Members who traded stocks at the time accepted the risk that the public may criticize them for prioritizing their personal wealth over the public interest and possibly trading with inside information.
The lack of deterrence was seen more recently this year when various tariff policy announcements rattled financial markets. During the fifty-five days after President Trump publicized his plan for reciprocal tariffs on February 13, 2025, more than 50 members of Congress made a total of over 2,000 trades involving approximately 700 companies. The stock value of many of these companies was directly connected to tariff policies. Despite public reporting on the large volume of well-timed trades and the appearance of conflicts of interest, it appears that none of those traders felt accountable to public disapproval.
III. A New Wave of Reform
The modern financial disclosure requirements for lawmakers originated in a 1967 study of Congressional ethics that found “[m]uch distrust of government flows from ambiguous circumstances where there is ground for suspicion that officials are promoting their own welfare rather than the public’s.” In response, Congress adopted internal disclosure rules in 1968 that were codified and amended with more disclosure requirements over several decades. The result is that today the “ambiguous circumstances” and “grounds for suspicion” persist with lawmakers trading stocks connected to companies and industries they oversee.
The Restore Trust in Congress Act represents a necessary shift. The success of this approach would be a harbinger for potential executive branch reforms, where the same drawbacks of relying solely on disclosure are constantly evident.
Thanks to transparency, the public is aware of apparent conflicts of interest that have no consequences, including: allegations of pay-to-play transactions involving President Trump; dozens of political appointees with hundreds of financial conflicts of interests; and numerous former lobbyists leading agencies they previously lobbied. These examples illustrate that every branch needs to update their approach to ethics. A ban on congressional stock trading could generate a wave of change with ripple effects throughout government ethics.
Kedric L. Payne is the Vice President and General Counsel at Campaign Legal Center (CLC). At CLC, Mr. Payne has been at the forefront of advancing reforms on issues such as congressional stock trading, Supreme Court ethics enforcement and executive branch conflicts of interest. Before joining CLC, Mr. Payne had served as the Deputy Chief Counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and as a Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Energy.