Will stock trade ban curtail DOD budget corruption?

A new bipartisan proposal to ban members of Congress and their immediate family members from trading individual stocks looks to close a glaring conflict of interest between politicians who control massive government budgets, much of which go to private contractors.

The potential for serious conflicts of interest are quickly apparent when reviewing the stock trades of members of Congress's Senate and House Armed Services Committees, the panels responsible for the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that sets recommended funding levels for the Department of Defense.

The 2024 NDAA authorized $886 billion, approximately half of which will go to contractors.

Five of the six most traded individual stocks by members of the House Armed Services Committee in the past year — Baxter International, Alphabet, NetApp, General Motors and KKR — had contracts with the Department of Defense, meaning that members may stand to benefit from the NDAA via their investments in companies with Pentagon contracts.

Members of the committee’s Senate counterpart, the Senate Armed Services Committee, also traded heavily in stocks. Like the House committee, five of the six most traded stocks by members on the Senate Committee — Cleveland Cliffs, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, Humacyte and Chevron — had contracts with the Department of Defense.

The new “ETHICS Act,” introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) addresses this increasingly glaring ethics problem in members personal finances and would prohibit the sort of trades that members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are currently conducting.

.