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At least 10 senators reported stock purchases or sales last year involving companies in industries overseen by the committees they serve on. These transactions worry government watchdog groups, as a bipartisan effort to ban the practice has faltered on Capitol Hill.
Most of those senators who invested in stocks that overlap with their committee assignments over the last year have comprehensive financial portfolios, not all of which raise potential conflict-of-interest issues, according to a database of congressional financial filings compiled by Capitol Trades and reviewed by CNN. But the more than a dozen trades from this small group of well-connected senators provide a window into why the phenomenon of lawmaker stock-trading has led to public outrage – and a major push to ban the practice.
When disclosing stock trades, lawmakers have to include the owner of the stock. Among the senators who listed themselves as owners of stock in industries that their committees regulate are Republicans Bill Hagerty, John Kennedy, Ashley Moody, Jerry Moran, Bernie Moreno, Markwayne Mullin and Tommy Tuberville and Democrats John Hickenlooper, Gary Peters and Sheldon Whitehouse. In the House, lawmakers have an option to not disclose the owner of the stock.
“It’s all extremely troubling,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s a bipartisan problem. Republicans and Democrats are guilty of this, pretty evenly across the board. There’s an institutional rot at the core of this.”
The trades made by the senators are legal, and lawmakers who disclosed these trades have denied they have any personal control over how their stock portfolios are invested.
But polls have consistently found widespread support for banning members of Congress from owning stocks. The issue has received national attention — and alarmed nonpartisan ethics experts — thanks to suspiciously timed sales at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and from active trading by high-profile members like former longtime House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And over the years, dozens of lawmakers have disclosed stock trades in companies that are influenced by their committee work.
At least one Democrat and one Republican who have supported congressional stock-trading bans are among the senators who disclosed trades in recent months involving companies that cross their committee work.
An ongoing trend
That Republican, Sen. Moody, in recent weeks introduced a bipartisan bill to ban lawmaker stock-trading.
Yet, the Florida Republican who sits on the Senate’s health committee, invested in five health care companies, according to federal records. Those include buying between $100,000 and $250,000 in the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly last March.
Eli Lilly spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress last year. The panel’s GOP chair released a report about federal drug-pricing that relied on testimony from Eli Lilly, and Senate Democrats are scrutinizing the company’s relationship with telehealth firms.
Moody’s office said in a statement to CNN that the Florida Republican has never approved or initiated a stock trade.
“When she was appointed to the Senate at the end of January 2025, she was a part of an extended family investment partnership where a partner independently made investment decisions in consultation with a third-party financial advisor, and with no input from the Senator,” her office said in the statement.
Since then, Moody’s office says the senator “immediately” took steps to withdraw from the partnership and has not traded stocks since April 2025. “As a sign of this commitment, Senator Moody introduced legislation to restore trust in Congress and ensure there is no appearance of impropriety as it relates to members trading individual stocks,” the statement reads.
Hickenlooper, a Democrat, also invested in a company that overlaps with his committee assignments, despite recently becoming a co-sponsor on legislation that would put restrictions on lawmaker stock-trading activity.
In September 2025, Hickenlooper invested between $100,000 and $250,000 into a cybersecurity company called Palo Alto Networks while serving on the Senate Commerce Committee, records show.
The General Services Administration announced a new partnership in December letting federal agencies buy Palo Alto Network products at discounts up to 60%. Experts told CNN this raised red flags because the contracts could benefit Hickenlooper, whose committee does oversight of federal contracts.
In response, a Hickenlooper spokesperson told CNN that the senator “does not personally trade stocks. His stocks are already in a blind trust and have been since he was mayor of Denver in 2003. All decisions are made by a manager without the senator’s prior knowledge or input.” The spokesperson also pointed to Hickenlooper’s co-sponsoring of legislation that would force all members of Congress to place their stocks into a qualified blind trust so that they can’t use insider information to inform their portfolio decisions and turn a profit.
Mullin, a Republican who is also on the Senate health panel, sold stock in January 2025 through a joint account with his wife in Abbott Laboratories, a medical devices and health care company. Abbott listed the Senate as part of its lobbying efforts one month before Mullin’s trade.
At that time, Abbott was in the midst of a slew of yearslong lawsuits over contaminated baby formula, including one case that led to a $495 million damages award.
But Mullin’s office maintains that the senator is not making the trades directly. “Senator Mullin uses an independent, third-party operator firm that manages all stock portfolio investments on his behalf,” a spokesperson said. “He does not conduct nor inform trades. This independent firm reports bi-weekly with Senate Ethics to ensure compliance with federal law.”
And Whitehouse, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, disclosed between $1,000 and $15,000 of stock in UnitedHealth Company in November 2025 in an account he owns.
Still, a Whitehouse spokesperson, Meaghan McCabe, distanced the Rhode Island Democrat from the trade. “The Senator does not trade stocks, and his account manager is contractually required to act independently without any input from the Senator. He supports a ban on members trading stocks and is reviewing the various proposals,” Whitehouse spokesperson Meaghan McCabe told CNN.
Records show that Moran bought stock in Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, on the same day he participated in the Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing to discuss the future of artificial intelligence.
Executives from major technology companies like OpenAI and Microsoft testified as witnesses at the hearing, though no one from Alphabet or Google.
When the Republican bought the stocks in May, the Senate was actively considering deregulating AI, which would benefit companies like Alphabet. After a major public backlash, the provision creating a moratorium on AI regulations was stripped out of the final version of Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill.”
“Sen. Moran’s financial investments are managed independently by a broker, who has full discretion over Sen. Moran’s investment accounts,” a Moran spokesperson told CNN.
CNN has reached out to Hagerty, Kennedy, Moreno, Peters and Tuberville for comment.
Ethics concerns persist
Experts on congressional stock-trading told CNN they weren’t satisfied with the senators’ explanations.
Emma Lydon, managing director of progressive lobbying group P Street, said “merely the perception” of potential insider training “erodes trust in our democracy.” She noted that multiple studies have found that, on average, lawmakers who trade stocks often outperform the S&P.
“When caught making eyebrow-raising trades, members of Congress often claim ignorance, saying the trades were done without their knowledge by independent financial brokers,” Lydon said. “Unfortunately for the American people, it’s impossible to know whether they’re telling the truth.”
Kedric Payne, who runs the ethics program at the Campaign Legal Center, a left-leaning advocacy group, said conflict-of-interest concerns persist because of the opaqueness of the current system, where lawmakers can legally trade stocks in companies while deciding how those industries are regulated.
“The public will always question whether any decision made by that member on that committee was really focused on what’s best for the constituents, or what’s best for their personal financial gain,” Payne said.
Payne, who worked in the Office of Congressional Ethics when the stock-trading disclosure law was passed in 2012, added that, “it is nearly impossible to prove that they use insider Information, but trades like these look like a conflict of interest – and therefore the harm to the public interest remains.”
Bipartisan momentum stalls out
While some bills are active in the Senate, a House-negotiated compromise to ban future stock-trading by members of Congress and force them to divest all existing holdings seemed to pick up the most momentum of the proposals on the Hill last year.
At one point, a small group of House Republicans were trying to circumvent their party’s leadership to bring that bipartisan bill to the floor. But that maneuver is still far away from clinching the signatures needed, and leaders from both parties have recently taken steps to undermine that bipartisan proposal, stakeholders say.
That bill, the Restore Trust in Congress Act, was “the product of painstaking negotiations,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. Its 127 cosponsors include conservative Republicans like Rep. Chip Roy and Rep. Nancy Mace, and progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar.
In December, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries rolled out a separate congressional stock ban proposal that would also apply to Trump and Vice President JD Vance — a nonstarter among most Republican lawmakers. This move alarmed ethics experts and liberal activists who supported that policy in principle, but saw the new bill as an attempt to tank the more viable bipartisan bill.
“The Jeffries bill was a problem because it got in the way of the bipartisan consensus bill that would really solve the issue,” Payne said. “So out of nowhere, you had this obstacle, which was not needed, coming from Jeffries.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been pressured by fellow Republicans to allow a vote on the bipartisan bill, made his move last month. He backed a watered-down GOP proposal that would let members keep their current stock portfolios, but it would require a seven-day notice before a stock sale and would prevent lawmakers and their families from making new purchases. Democrats and some nonpartisan ethics experts say that might make the problem worse.
“It has so many loopholes that it’s a paper tiger,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “They can now rally around this, and claim that they did something. But it’s a big fat nothing-burger, in terms of solving the problem.”
The House Administration Committee advanced that bill earlier this month with only GOP support, teeing up a likely floor vote.
This story has been updated with additional details.