Biden supports a ban on congressional stock trading
President Joe Biden endorsed banning members of Congress from trading stocks, throwing his waning political capital behind long-running efforts to prevent lawmakers from profiting off of their unique access to market-moving information.
Biden expressed his support for changing the requirements for lawmakers during an interview with Democratic political adviser Faiz Shakir for the advocacy journalism outlet More Perfect Union. During the interview, Biden sought to cement his legacy as a politician who spent decades fighting trickle-down economic policies that benefited the country’s richest.
“Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re in the Congress,” Biden said.
It’s unclear what impact Biden’s comments will have during the final days of the lame-duck congressional session, as the spotlight shifts to President-elect Donald Trump. But the interview highlighted the stark financial differences between the outgoing president and his successor, a multibillionaire who has not yet divested from his financial interests or limited potential conflicts of interest.
In the interview with More Perfect Union, Biden reflected on being consistently ranked as one of the poorest members of Congress. He said he lived on his Senate salary rather than on investments in the markets.
“I don’t know how you look your constituents in the eye and know, because the job they gave you, gave you an inside track to make more money,” he said.
Biden largely sidestepped a question from Shakir about the high concentration of billionaires in the incoming administration. He said that most billionaires pay an average tax rate of 8.2 percent, which he said was lower than the rate for diner workers. The Washington Post has previously reported that this cohort paid an effective tax rate of 23.1 percent in 2014.
“Americans are beginning to catch on to what is going on,” he said. “And I think that’s why you’re going to see a lot of what we’ve been able to get done, I don’t think you’re going to see the Republicans get rid of.”
He also criticized adding tariffs to every product imported from a country, after Trump proposed tariffs that would impose a 25 percent levy on Mexican and Canadian goods and an additional 10 percent tax on Chinese goods.
“Who pays the tariff? The middle class,” he said.
Biden’s comments about banning lawmakers from trading stocks were first reported by the Associated Press. The full More Perfect Union interview published on Tuesday evening.
For years, bipartisan groups of lawmakers have pushed legislation to ban or limit congressional stock trading. But to date, they’ve failed. Biden previously declined to take a position on the issue. In 2022, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would “let members of leadership in Congress and members of Congress determine what the rules should be.”
The efforts got renewed traction in July, when Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff (Georgia), Gary Peters (Michigan) and Jeff Merkley (Oregon) and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri) introduced legislation that would bar members of Congress from buying and selling individual stock and also impose similar limits on their spouses and dependent children. The legislation advanced out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but it has yet to see a floor vote.