When Donald Trump’s top trade official was in the middle of testifying to Congress on Wednesday, the markets seemed to be in a free fall. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, was speaking to Congress only hours after Trump went on his social media platform and encouraged investors to buy stocks at low prices.
As Greer was testifying, something unexpected happened: The president announced a 90-day pause on sweeping global tariffs. After days of turmoil, the stock market began to soar. Congressional Democrats piled on to ask whether any Trump friends had received a secret tipoff about the tariff flip-flop.
“Who’s benefiting? What billionaire just got richer?” Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., asked Greer. As trade representative, a Cabinet-level position for setting trade policy, Greer defended Trump’s actions.
Greer, however, wasn’t the only one facing questions about who had benefited from the market volatility. Some members of Congress wondered aloud if any of their own colleagues on the Hill had made money on the crashing and rising stocks.
“Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said on X. “I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor.”
“Banning members from owning and trading individual stocks would be a clear signal that this kind of conduct is not acceptable.”
The speculation was part of renewed attention to several proposals to ban stock trading by members of Congress themselves. Such measures have struggled to advance on Capitol Hill despite overwhelming public support — with some advocates saying the time for Congress to act after years of dithering is now.
“Both President Trump’s conduct, and the concern that his political cronies in Congress and outside it are profiting from the president’s haphazard tariff policy are just another example of how the public is forced to question whether the president and members of Congress are putting their personal financial interest ahead of the public’s interest,” said Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel of the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Banning members from owning and trading individual stocks would be a clear signal that this kind of conduct is not acceptable.”
Rumors on the Floor
For years, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has pushed for legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks — legislation that has languished under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
The co-sponsor of one pending bill, Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., told The Intercept that Trump’s actions generated a burst of discussion on Capitol Hill.
“The events of the last 48 hours were a stark reminder to members of Congress, and to the public, that the opportunity for insider trading in Washington is significant, is egregious and needs to stop,” Magaziner said. “We need, in the short-term, immediate transparency over who traded in the last 48 hours, and then we need to pass a bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks once and for all.”
Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn
Ocasio-Cortez, who has co-sponsored another bill banning stock trades, noted on X that there is already a law on the books requiring members of Congress to disclose trades. Under the STOCK Act, signed into law by Barack Obama in 2012, they have 30 days to report transactions.
In addition to boosting transparency, the statute was meant to prohibit lawmakers from profiting on insider trading. Critics, however, say it has proven toothless. Even the straightforward disclosure requirements are routinely violated with few consequences.
One economic study of congressional trades using data provided under the STOCK Act found no evidence that members of Congress outperformed random stock picking.
Supporters of tighter restrictions say that even a handful of insider trades would be enough to further shake the public’s rock-bottom confidence in Congress. Dozens of lawmakers have disclosed trades that intersect with their committees’ jurisdiction, the New York Times found in a 2022 analysis.
The prospect of insider trading has become a frequent target for populists on the left and right. In a 2022 podcast, Joe Rogan sounded off on the topic and on Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., whose husband’s prolific trading has drawn suspicion. Nationally, 86 percent of voters support a ban on trading individual stocks, according to a 2023 University of Maryland poll.
Magaziner’s bill, co-sponsored with ultra-conservative Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, would force members, their spouses, and their minor children to either sell off stock holdings or move them into blind trusts, as some members already do. Members would still be allowed to trade broad-based mutual and exchange-traded funds.
Democratic leaders have been roadblocks in the past, Magaziner was careful to note, although he described current leadership as more supportive.
“While it is true that the tariff announcement has renewed a lot of people’s interest on the Democratic side,” he said, “I would just caution that the only way we get this reform passed is if it’s bipartisan, because we don’t have unanimity on the Democratic side.”
Words to the Wise
The sequence of events on Wednesday — Trump’s public social media message urging investors to buy, followed by the market-juicing tariff pause — generated concern that fervent Trump supporters were given a chance to profit as the public worried over retirement savings.
There were also observers who asked whether Trump family members or the president’s friends on Wall Street were privately given more specific advance notice of the tariff pause.
In a letter Thursday, Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Ruben Gallego, R-Ariz., called on the Office of Government Ethics to mount an “urgent inquiry” into potential insider trading.
A White House spokesperson dismissed the Democratic critiques as “partisan games.”
“It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” Kush Desai told The Intercept.
“If you have DOGE going around firing people who might enforce these laws, these laws won’t get enforced.”
Along with the weakening of the stock market regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the purge of career civil servants by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Trump’s general attitude toward profiting off elective office set off alarms for Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group focusing on corruption in government.
Hauser expressed heightened concerns about the possibility for administration officials to covertly signal hedge funders about market-moving news.
“The only way we would find out about this is if the SEC staff was empowered to look and then empowered to do something about it if they saw it, and those two ifs have become less certain due to the actions of the president more generally in the last few months,” Hauser said. “If you have DOGE going around firing people who might enforce these laws, these laws won’t get enforced. That’s why we have civil-service protections.”
