In the film "Wall Street," Gordon Gekko called information the most valuable commodity he knew of. Congress took that as a benefits package. On September 30, the Senate voted 53-47 on a bill to limit lawmakers' stock trading, seven votes short of the 60 needed to start debate. So the trading desk stays open.

I have spent more than three decades around other people's money. Since 2015, I have been a designated expert witness in federal and state courts on what fiduciaries owe the people they serve. At a family office, a trustee who traded ahead of the investment committee would leave with a cardboard box and probably a subpoena.

Congress is the trustee of a government that just crossed $40 trillion in debt in August. Its members should live under the same rules we do, with no carve-outs and no riders.

The House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, H.R. 7008, 232-198 on July 22, with 13 Democrats on board. It bars members, spouses, and dependent children from buying individual stocks. It requires public notice seven to 14 days before a sale. Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) said it "ensures no lawmaker can profit off of insider information." Critics note that it still lets members keep what they already own. The bill also carries a photo ID requirement for voting.

Senate Democrats called the ID language a poison pill and the trading limits too weak, so every Democrat in the upper chamber voted no. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the bill “as ineffective as a screen door on a submarine.”Fair enough, but the vote only asked whether the Senate would begin debate. Senators who think the bill is weak could have opened it and deliberated it on the floor. Photo ID would pass tomorrow on its own vote. Bundling the two handed Democrats a ready excuse.

Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote in 1928 that fiduciaries are held to “the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive,” and that conduct allowed between strangers is forbidden to them.

The investment advisory industry applies a modest version. SEC rules require firms' staff to report quarterly holdings and get approval before buying into initial public offerings. Congress gets lighter requirements. Members sit through classified briefings and committee markups, and the STOCK Act of 2012 gives them up to 45 days to report trades.

Business Insider found 49 members reporting their trades belatedly in 2020 and 2021 — why not, when the penalty starts at $200? Most were paperwork cases, as PolitiFact cautions. A rule that cheap invites nobody to read the fine print. How well the information pays is an old and much debated question. A peer-reviewed study from 1993 to 1998 found that stocks senators bought beat the market by 85 basis points a month.

In a May Economist/YouGov poll, 76 percent said members shouldn't buy and sell individual stocks, with 77 percent of Republicans in agreement, and 41 percent said most members of Congress are corrupt. The names are familiar. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has claimed through her office that she owns no stocks and has no knowledge of her husband's trades. His 2026 House filings, one in June and one in August, list Intel call options valued at $1 million to $5 million, then July purchases of Intel and Bloom Energy stock and calls.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Democrat who criticizes colleagues who trade, reported 5,402 trades in 2025 and carries an estimated net worth of $167 million. He says family trusts make the trades, not him. Nobody here is charged with doing anything wrong — that's the design flaw. Disclosure tells voters what happened, long after the fact.

The stakes track the scale. The Congressional Budget Office reported a $2.0 trillion deficit through August, with interest costs up $111 billion, or 12 percent. Its baseline put net interest at $1.0 trillion this year, above defense spending in every year it projects. Appropriations, tariff schedules, and defense contracts all move share prices, and members vote on every one of them.

I backed DOGE and thought it stopped short. Audit the conflicts too. The House bill is a start. Its penalty, the greater of $2,000 or 10 percent of the trade plus the gain, would sting, even if the grandfather clause would not. I would have them require divestiture or a blind trust within 180 days, cover spouses and dependents, cut the 45-day reporting window to two business days, and strip every rider.

Keep the exemption for diversified funds, so members can still own the whole market. They just can't pick winners from the rooms where winners get chosen. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has argued that a ban would drive off qualified candidates, and the pay complaint has some basis. Rank-and-file members last got a raise in 2009, to $174,000, and inflation has trimmed that pay by about 33 percent in the time since.

Still, they campaigned for the job and knew the salary going in. If $174,000 is too little, argue for a raise in the open. Sunlight beats a side hustle. Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.