They Earn $174,000.
They Traded $5.3 Billion.
You Have $955.

I filled up my tank this morning. $112 for my Chevy pickup.

Gas in California is pushing $6 a gallon. In some counties it's already past it. I stood there at the pump doing math in my head—the kind of math you do when you're trying to figure out which bills can wait until next Friday. The kind of math where you're choosing between a full tank and fresh groceries for your kids.

Then I came home and opened the congressional stock trading database.

And I stopped doing math. Because the numbers stopped making sense a long time ago.

The Number They Want You to Believe

Members of the United States Congress earn a base salary of $174,000 per year. That's the number they put on the disclosure forms. That's the number they cite when they tell you they're "public servants." That's the number you'll see in every civics textbook and every campaign brochure.

One hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars.

It's a good salary. It's roughly 2.8 times what the median American worker earns. Most of us would take it in a heartbeat.

But it's a fiction. A convenient, carefully maintained fiction. Because $174,000 isn't what they make. It's not even close.

So we did something about it. Not a petition. Not a tweet. We built a database. Every single stock trade disclosed under the STOCK Act going back to 2016. All 95,501 of them. Then we started matching those trades against the votes these people were casting, the committees they sat on, the bills they were pushing through. Sector by sector. Dollar by dollar. Name by name.

I wish I could tell you the results were shocking. They weren't. If you've been paying any kind of attention, you already know. But seeing it laid out—the actual numbers, the names attached, the dates lined up—that part still hits different.

The Salary Multiple

Start with Michael McCaul. Republican. Texas. Been in Congress since 2005. Earns $174,000 a year like all of them.

His stock trading volume? $1.26 billion.

I had to check that number three times. Billion. With a B. That works out to 7,266 times his annual salary. The man could work for seven thousand years at his congressional pay rate and still not match what he's moved through the market.

Then there's Ro Khanna. Democrat, California. In 2025 alone—one calendar year—he made 3,401 stock trades. I did the math and it comes out to about nine trades a day. Every day. Saturdays and Sundays included. Christmas included. Nine trades a day, $99.8 million for the year. I genuinely don't know when this man has time to legislate.

And Pelosi. You already know the name. Everybody does. She only made 18 trades in 2025. Just 18. But when your trades run in the $5-to-$25 million range, you don't need volume. She unloaded Apple stock twice in the last week of December—each sale somewhere between $5 million and $25 million. That's potentially $50 million in Apple. Moved in two weeks. By someone who earns $174,000 a year. On paper.

I keep going back to that $955 number because I think most of us are a lot closer to it than we'd like to admit. Hold both of those numbers in your head at the same time. That's the actual country we're living in.

And these people aren't outliers. That's the part that really gets me. Jefferson Shreve—a freshman out of Indiana, hasn't finished his first term yet—traded $42.4 million in year one. Year one. Tony Wied from Wisconsin moved $26.8 million in 12 trades. Twelve. That's over $2 million every time he picked up the phone. Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey, made four Microsoft trades on the same day—buys and sells, back and forth—up to $12 million combined. On a Tuesday afternoon.

You want to know what I was doing on a Tuesday? Trying to figure out if I could push my electric bill to the next pay period. Checking whether the cheaper gas station across town was worth the drive. Picking up ground beef at $7.49 a pound, looking at it, and putting it back.

That's the gap we're talking about. Not the gap between rich and poor—everybody already knows that one exists. This is the gap between the people who write the rules and the people stuck living under them. And it's not really a gap anymore. It's a canyon. They're standing on the other side of it, trading millions on information we'll never see, shielded by laws they wrote themselves, paying less than a parking ticket when they get caught.

What $955 Feels Like

Let me put the other side of this equation on the table, because the people making these trades sure as hell aren't thinking about it.

The National Institute on Retirement Security released a report this year that landed like a gut punch for anyone paying attention: the median working American has $955 saved for retirement. Not $955,000. Nine hundred and fifty-five dollars. That's less than one month's rent in every major city in the country.

Eighty percent of older American households are either financially struggling right now or at risk of falling into economic insecurity as they age. Not 8 percent. Eighty.

Americans are carrying $1.277 trillion in credit card debt—the highest on record since the Federal Reserve started tracking it. Twenty-nine percent of cardholders are carrying five-figure balances, up from 23 percent just last year. A third of Americans are using credit cards to buy groceries. Not luxuries. Not vacations. Groceries.

The average family of four spends between $900 and $1,200 a month on food—up from roughly $480 a month in 2020. That's a 42 percent increase in six years. Wages went up 1 percent. Inflation went up 3 percent. You do the math. Actually, you've been doing the math every day. You're exhausted from doing the math.

Meanwhile, a member of Congress earns $174,000 in salary, receives $16,800 in taxpayer-funded health insurance premiums, gets a guaranteed FERS pension accruing at 1.7 percent per year, enjoys up to 5 percent TSP matching, and spends roughly 239 days per year out of session.

And trades millions—sometimes billions—in stocks.

With a $200 fine if they file their disclosure late.

The $200 Parking Ticket

The STOCK Act, passed in 2012 with great fanfare, requires members of Congress to disclose stock trades within 45 days. The penalty for failing to do so: $200.

Two hundred dollars.

A parking ticket in downtown D.C. can run you $250. So the fine for a member of Congress failing to disclose a million-dollar stock trade on time is less than the cost of parking illegally near the building where they passed the law.

Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama who sits on the Armed Services Committee, racked up over 130 late filings. He paid the $200 fines and kept trading defense stocks. Business Insider documented that he traded in companies like Honeywell—which holds billions in defense contracts—while participating in Armed Services Committee hearings on the defense authorization bill.

No investigation. No consequences. Not even embarrassment. Because the system isn't broken. The system is working exactly the way they designed it.

They're Debating a Fix Right Now. It Won't Work.

This week, Congress is advancing the Stop Insider Trading Act and the End Congressional Stock Trading Act. President Trump called for a stock trading ban in his State of the Union address and got a rare bipartisan standing ovation.

The ovation was the tell. When both parties applaud, it means the bill is safe. It means the loopholes are already in place.

Here's what the proposed "ban" actually does:

Members would be prohibited from purchasing new individual stocks. But they can keep every stock they already own. They must give seven days' notice before selling. The fine for violations: $2,000 or 10 percent of the trade value, whichever is greater. — Stop Insider Trading Act, S.1879, 119th Congress

So Nancy Pelosi's existing portfolio—worth hundreds of millions—would be grandfathered in. She just can't buy more. She can still sell, as long as she tells you seven days ahead of time that she's about to dump $25 million in Apple stock. By the time you read the filing, the trade is done, the price has moved, and the profit is banked.

The bill doesn't cover adult children. It doesn't cover LLCs. It doesn't cover trusts. It doesn't cover the spouses' independently managed accounts that somehow make the same trades at the same time.

This isn't a ban. It's a press release.

You're Cutting Coupons. They're Cutting Deals.

I want to be clear about what this data means for people like me—and probably like you.

It means the person who votes on whether to raise the minimum wage has a stock portfolio worth more than your entire neighborhood combined. It means the person who decides whether to extend unemployment benefits has never, not once in their adult life, wondered if their debit card would decline at the checkout.

It means the person who sets the interest rate policy that determines whether you can afford a mortgage has $50 million in Apple stock and a guaranteed pension.

It means the system isn't broken. It's two systems. One for them and one for us. And the gap between those two systems isn't shrinking. It's accelerating.

In 2020, when Congress received classified COVID briefings about a virus that would kill over a million Americans, congressional stock trading hit 1,681 trades in a single month—the highest in the dataset—with 67 unique members making moves. Senator Burr sold up to $1.72 million in hotel and travel stocks after attending the briefing. Senator Loeffler sold millions and bought telework companies. The DOJ investigated both. Both investigations were dropped.

In April 2025, when "Liberation Day" tariffs were announced, congressional trading hit 1,692 trades—a new all-time record. Seven hundred and sixty-five trades in a single week, from 29 different members. The S&P crashed 10 percent and then surged 9.5 percent in the span of a week. Anyone positioned for the reversal made a fortune.

You weren't positioned. You were at work.

The Numbers Don't Lie. The People Do.

Every member of Congress who trades stocks will tell you the same thing: "My assets are in a blind trust." Or: "My spouse manages our finances independently." Or: "I had no knowledge of the trade."

The data says otherwise. When 67 members trade simultaneously in the same month after receiving the same classified briefing, that's not coincidence. When semiconductor trades spike to 60 in a single week as the CHIPS Act advances through committee, that's not independent financial planning. When the single highest trading month in a decade coincides with the single biggest tariff announcement in history, that's not a blind trust making decisions.

It's a system where the people who write the rules are exempt from following them. Where the cops are the criminals. Where the fine for getting caught is less than the price of a good dinner in the city they work in.

And we're supposed to trust them with our tax dollars, our healthcare, our children's education, and our retirement.

Look at the Data Yourself

We're not asking you to take our word for it. We built the tools so you can see it yourself.

Search for your representative. See what they've been trading, how much, and when. Sort by party—you'll see this isn't a red or blue problem. Republicans trade more energy and defense stocks. Democrats trade more tech. Both sides trade healthcare. The amounts are staggering on both sides of the aisle.

This is a class problem. It's the people who make the rules versus the people who live under them.