Congressman Who Campaigned On Banning Members From Trading Stocks Traded $7.2 Million Since January

Rep. Rob Bresnahan has made 626 stock trades since being sworn into office.

Last November, Rob Bresnahan, whose personal net worth is reportedly as high as $69 million, was elected to represent a Pennsylvania district where the median household income is $66,602. On May 15, 2025, Congressman Bresnahan sold his shares of stock in Centene, a Medicaid provider. Roughly a week later, Bresnahan voted for the Congressional megabill that cut over $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next ten years, a move that both imperiled 12 million Americans’ healthcare and sent Centene’s stock plummeting by roughly 40% on a single day. Because he dumped his stocks, Bresnahan’s financial portfolio was unscathed by Centene’s crash, and Bresnahan, like other members of Congress, still has access to health insurance.

That was just the tip of the iceberg for Bresnahan. The site Capitol Trades reports that, as of early August 2025, Bresnahan has made 626 stock trades with a total volume of $7.2 million since he was sworn into office in January.

What’s worse: Just six months ago, Bresnahan campaigned on banning members of Congress from trading stocks. In March 2024, he went so far as to write a letter-to-the editor to a local paper, The Citizens’ Voice, arguing that it’s wrong for members of Congress to trade stocks and that he’d support a ban. Last week, a journalist from the local public radio station WVIA Public Media (whose funding Bresnahan also voted to cut) asked Bresnahan whether he’d tell his financial advisor to stop trading his stocks. Bresnahan replied, “And then do what with it? Just leave it all in the accounts and just leave it there and lose money and go broke?”

In response to the interview, Eli Cousin, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), summarized what a lot of people must have been thinking: “Multi-millionaire Rob Bresnahan is full of shit.”

Bresnahan is far from the only one. According to End Citizens United research based on Capitol Trades data, in 2022 members of Congress collectively traded $265 million worth of stock and by last year that ballooned to $707 million. The top ten stocks traded by members of Congress from January 2023 to July 2025 were: Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Meta Platforms Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, and Johnson & Johnson. So, our elected officials are trading the stocks of behemoth tech, financial, and healthcare corporations while also making decisions that affect government contracts and laws, not to mention potential anti-trust regulation that could break up corporate monopolies.

Those facts are screaming alarm bells that the current system is not working for most of us. As Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, put it: “Congress should focus on solving real problems—not getting rich off insider trading when they were elected to serve the public.”

It’s just a bad idea for government officials to be able to directly personally profit off passing (or not passing) certain laws by trading stocks. Plus, the information that members of Congress receive through their jobs is not currently legally considered insider information, which makes it even likelier that they can protect or enrich themselves because of their government positions. As Bresnahan showed us, the conflicts of interest are not hypothetical.

In a country otherwise defined by political polarization, the American people agree on this. An overwhelming bipartisan majority, 86% of Americans, support Congressional stock trading bans.

In May, Senators Mark Kelly and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats, re-introduced the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, which would require all members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to place their stocks into a blind trust or divest from their currently held stocks. “The corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions,” Ossoff told the crowd at a No Kings Day rally in Atlanta. “The corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. The corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood and Congress doesn’t do anything about it. This is why so many have lost faith in our system, because the system really is rigged.” That’s how our elected officials should be talking about money in politics.

Recent polling from End Citizens United shows that voters in crucial swing states perceive Democrats as more corrupt than Republicans. That may not make much sense to some of us, especially given the national headlines over the last six months. But the polling makes crystal clear that Democrats need to do a much better job convincing voters that they’re in office to fight for working people while Republicans are there to line their own pockets and work for their billionaire backers.

Last Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs advanced a bill that would prohibit stock trading by lawmakers, presidents, and vice presidents. All the Democrats on the committee supported the bill. Only one Republican voted yes. Several other Republicans defended members of Congress trading stocks. The Republican who argued for the bill was Senator Josh Hawley, the bill’s sponsor.

Hawley spoke forcefully about the deep unfairness of elected officials trading stocks. “Back during COVID you saw members of Congress of both parties engage in a flurry of stock trading right after they were getting COVID briefings,” he said, when introducing the bill. “Were members of the public getting those briefings? No, they were not. When you look at what members of Congress are privy to, what they are able to trade on, the access that they have, it's just qualitatively different than your average Joe or Jane… and that’s why we ought to put in place common sense guardrails.” Meanwhile, Florida Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna has promised to force a vote on a stock trading ban when the House reconvenes in September.

Hawley and Luna are setting up a fight within the Republican Party. So far, many of their Republican colleagues oppose Congressional stock trading bans, even though a majority of their voters support them. As Democrats try to regain voters across the country, they have an opportunity to seize on this issue and fight and rally around wildly popular anti-corruption measures like the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act.

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