# STOCK Act The **Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012**, passed 96–3 and 417–2 after a *60 Minutes* report on congressional trading, affirmed that members of Congress and federal employees are subject to insider-trading law, and required members, their spouses and dependent children to report securities trades within 45 days. What it did not do is the reason it is in the vault: it does not bar members from owning or trading stock in the companies their committees oversee. Its enforcement provision — a $200 late-filing fee, waivable — is the whole of the penalty, and reporting compliance has been spotty since; the 2013 amendment quietly removed the requirement that the disclosures be searchable online. ## What it permits The structural permission is documented on [[Congressional SPCX Stock Purchases]] and [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]]: members of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees holding defense contractors; the 2020 pandemic-briefing trades that produced investigations of four senators and no charges; and the second-term pattern of trades timed to tariff announcements and the Iran strikes ([[Iran War Market Manipulation]], [[Policy Front-Running]]), where the executive branch rather than Congress is the source of the information and the STOCK Act's coverage is thinner still. Prosecution under the Act has been essentially nil; the public record of trades is what the Act produced, and the watchdog sites built on it are its real enforcement. ## The ban that isn't Every Congress since 2020 has had a stock-trading ban with bipartisan sponsors and no floor time. On **July 22, 2026** the House passed H.R. 7008, 232–198, on a near party-line vote — a bill that bars members, spouses and dependents from *buying* new individual stocks, allows them to keep and sell what they hold with public notice, requires no divestiture and no blind trust, sets a penalty of $2,000 or 10% of the trade, and carries an attached photo-ID requirement for federal elections that Democrats called a poison pill. Only 13 Democrats voted for it; Seth Magaziner, whose stricter bill had cleared committee the year before, called it "a terrible bill" that does not ban trading. In the Senate, [[Josh Hawley]]'s divestiture bill passed committee in 2025 and stalled; the House bill's path there is unclear. The pattern is the STOCK Act's own: the reform that passes is the one that changes the least. ## See Also - [[Congressional Stock Trading]] · [[Congressional SPCX Stock Purchases]] · [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] · [[Iran War Market Manipulation]] · [[Policy Front-Running]] - [[Josh Hawley]] · [[Nancy Pelosi]] · [[Foundations Hub]]