Six bills, five tests, one honest comparison.

Every active bill claims to ban congressional stock trading. The interesting question is whether the bill text actually does what the press release says. These five tests separate a real reform from a campaign prop.

Sen. Josh Hawley reintroduced his Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act on April 28, 2025. The original PELOSI Act name was retired in committee through a Hawley substitute amendment that broadened scope and renamed the bill the Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions (HONEST) Act. Sen. Gary Peters became co-lead. On July 30, 2025, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee reported it out 8-7. Hawley was the only Republican to vote yes. Every committee Democrat joined him.

The bill requires outright divestment of individual stocks, commodities, futures, options, cryptocurrencies, and corporate bonds. Diversified mutual funds, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries remain allowed. The bill's most distinctive feature is that it explicitly disallows the use of qualified blind trusts as a workaround for covered instruments. Hawley's text rejects the idea that members can hide individual equity positions behind a trustee.

Coverage extends to the President, the Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses and dependent children. Senior staff, the Federal Reserve, and the Supreme Court are not covered. The penalty design is the strongest of any active bill: a civil penalty equal to 10% of the value of each instrument not divested, per period of violation, plus mandatory disgorgement of any profit on a violating transaction to the U.S. Treasury.

Trump initially expressed qualified support and reversed within hours, attacking Hawley personally on Truth Social. Republican senators not on the committee called the bill "poorly written" (Rand Paul), "obnoxious" (Ron Johnson), and "not ready for prime time" (James Lankford). Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Roll Call: "I doubt we put anything on the floor that just had one Republican on it." Hawley would need at least three more committee Republicans on board to flip Thune's calculus, and as of May 2026 he has none. Pelosi herself issued a statement endorsing the renamed bill: "If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it, no matter what they decide to name it."

Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Seth Magaziner (D-RI) introduced the Restore Trust in Congress Act on September 3, 2025, with a bipartisan working group of 16 original co-sponsors equally split between the parties. By early 2026 the bill had 130 cosponsors (99 Democrats, 31 Republicans), the largest coalition behind any active stock-trading-ban proposal. The Senate companion, S. 3649, was introduced on January 15, 2026, by Sens. Ashley Moody (R-FL) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

Mechanism: full divestment of individual stocks, securities, commodities, and futures. Diversified funds and certain personal-use commodities are allowed. No qualified blind trust carve-out. Sitting members have 180 days from enactment to comply. Newly elected members have 90 days from taking office. The timeline is the tightest of any bill on this list.

Coverage: members, spouses, dependent children, and trustees acting on their behalf. The bill deliberately does not cover the President, Vice President, executive branch, Federal Reserve, or Supreme Court. The omission was a Republican condition for the bipartisan coalition, and the Senate companion makes it explicit by exempting POTUS and VP. Senate Democrats criticized the omission. Magaziner has defended it as the price of moving any bill at all in a Republican-controlled chamber.

The political story is the bill's main weakness. Despite the coalition size, the House Administration Committee bypassed Roy/Magaziner in favor of the narrower Steil bill at its January 14, 2026 markup. Roll Call reported in March 2026 that the bipartisan working group's "united front began to crumble" as midterms approached. Magaziner on the substitution: "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."

The Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks Act, introduced August 2025 by Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Michael Cloud (R-TX), is the House twin of the framework Sens. Merkley, Gillibrand, and others negotiated into the HONEST Act on the Senate side. Campaign Legal Center and the Project on Government Oversight have publicly identified this framework as the strongest of the active bills.

Coverage: members, spouses, dependent children, the President, and the Vice President. No staff, no SCOTUS, no Fed. Mechanism: outright divestment of all covered investments. Diversified mutual funds, ETFs, and Treasuries remain allowed. No QBT carve-out.

The penalty structure is the cleanest of any bill on this list. Civil penalty equal to a member's monthly salary or 10% of the asset's value, whichever is greater, plus full disgorgement of profits. Repeat violators face escalating penalties. Campaign Legal Center cited this design specifically when calling on Congress to pass it: "monthly salary, or 10% of the value of the covered asset, whichever is greater."

The bill's problem is Tier 5 viability. H.R. 4890 was referred to House Administration and Judiciary in August 2025 and has not received committee action. Its substantive policy now lives in the Senate's HONEST Act, which has cleared committee but cannot reach a floor vote without more Republican support. The House version is functional dead text. The framework is alive but only in the Senate.

The Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust in Congress Act was the original 2020-era proposal, introduced in the 119th Congress on January 14, 2025, with Rep. Magaziner as lead after Rep. Abigail Spanberger left the House to run for Virginia governor (she won). The bill mandates that members place investment assets into a qualified blind trust within 90 days of enactment or of taking office, with assets remaining in the trust until 180 days after the member's tenure ends.

The mechanism is the bill's problem. Reform groups including Campaign Legal Center now classify QBT-only bills as a loophole rather than a solution. Historical experience suggests blind trust arrangements have been gamed. Members can structure communications with trustees that preserve effective awareness of holdings. The HONEST Act and Restore Trust in Congress Act both reject the QBT mechanism in favor of outright divestment, citing exactly this concern.

As of May 2026 the bill is functionally dormant. The Magaziner-Roy bipartisan effort effectively absorbed its goals into the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which uses the divestment mechanism instead. H.R. 396 remains on the books as a placeholder; no committee action is expected. We cover the deeper problem with QBT-based reforms in our analysis of the spouse provision, which is the other loophole that QBT-only bills typically leave wide open.

Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chair of the House Administration Committee, introduced the Stop Insider Trading Act on January 12, 2026. Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leadership endorsed it. The committee marked it up two days later, on January 14, 2026, by a 7-4 party-line vote after rejecting six Democratic amendments (including ones to add the President and Vice President, prohibit purchases more broadly, and require divestment of existing holdings). The Senate companion, S. 4134 by Sen. Pete Ricketts, has not been scheduled.

The bill is the leadership response to the November 2025 House Administration hearing and the February 2026 CNN investigation. Its language is narrow by design. The bill prohibits members, spouses, and dependent children from purchasing new individual stocks. It does not require divestment. Existing holdings are grandfathered indefinitely. Members may continue to sell positions provided they file public notice 7-14 days in advance. Dividend reinvestment is permitted, including into new stock positions.

The structural problem, flagged sharply by Campaign Legal Center in a January 30, 2026 fact sheet, is that the bill leaves the most-cited insider-trading concern of the past decade entirely intact. Members who sold healthcare stocks before pandemic disclosures, or sold defense stocks before contract cancellations, would not have violated the Stop Insider Trading Act. CLC: the bill "would allow the same kind of suspicious sales that generated the current push for reform" and "codifies a glaring loophole for the continued purchase of stocks by spouses and dependent children on behalf of another person."

Penalty design is, in isolation, reasonable: a fine of $2,000 or 10% of the transaction value (whichever is higher) for prohibited purchases, plus disgorgement. The penalty bites the wrong action. Buying is not the lawmaker behavior that generates most of the headlines. Selling on policy information is. Steil's bill leaves the latter untouched. The promised Q1 2026 floor vote slid past March 31, 2026, with no rescheduled date as of this writing.

H.R. 1908, introduced March 6, 2025, is the bill named in House Resolutions 665 and 725, the discharge petition vehicles filed by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to bypass committee leadership and force a floor vote. The petition needs 218 signatures. As of late March 2026 it had 82, including 15 Republicans and 59 Democrats, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik among them.

The bill's text would prohibit ownership and trading of individual stocks by members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children. It is structurally similar to the Restore Trust in Congress Act on coverage and mechanism. The reason it sits in the discharge column rather than the markup column is procedural: GOP leadership had already telegraphed the Steil bill as their preferred vehicle, leaving Luna and her cosigners no committee path forward.

Luna's recent quote captures the procedural reality: "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." With Trump publicly opposing the HONEST Act and the White House silent on every other bill on this list, a successful discharge would require approximately 136 additional signatures, almost certainly conditional on a fresh scandal of greater magnitude than the February 2026 CNN investigation. The base rate for successful discharge petitions in modern House history is extremely low.

Even the strongest bills on this list address a fraction of the actual surface area of conflicted government trading. Five categories sit outside every active proposal.

The honest answer is probably nothing meaningful. The 86% public-support number has been politically inert for years because the median member of Congress, in both parties, would prefer the status quo to any bill on this scorecard, and leadership in both chambers has the procedural tools to ensure that preference holds.

Three plausible scenarios for the rest of 2026, in order of probability: