Proponents of an effort to stop members of Congress from trading stocks are cautiously optimistic that it could pick up steam now that the government shutdown has ended.

The House Administration Committee will meet Wednesday morning for a hearing on the issue, a small step forward for the lawmakers threatening to use whatever procedural tactics are at their disposal to force a vote this Congress.

“If this is the beginning of a true, regular order process that leads to a markup and a floor vote, then that’s great,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., part of a bipartisan working group of House members who unveiled compromise legislation in September. “But if the speaker is just delaying progress, then that’s obviously unacceptable. So we’ll see.”

That compromise legislation was introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and dubbed the Restore Trust in Congress Act. During a news conference at the time, Roy said Johnson should “deliver it quickly to the floor of the House.” And Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., another member of the group, threatened to file a discharge petition to circumvent leadership and force a vote if there wasn’t meaningful action by the end of September.

But the push to ban members from owning or trading stocks, which goes back years and seemingly had been picking up momentum, was derailed by the shutdown that began on Oct. 1. Johnson opted to keep the House dormant for the duration of the funding lapse, putting hearings and markups on pause.

“We have been trying to push it, but it was tough during the shutdown,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., another member of the group. Jayapal said even with a hearing on the horizon, there’s a sense that leadership is slow-walking the legislation, but her Republican colleagues have continued to negotiate with Johnson on the topic.

The compromise bill led by Roy and Magaziner would require current members of Congress, along with their spouses and dependent children, to offload stocks within 180 days of enactment. New members would have to divest within 90 days of taking office. It would allow members to continue investing in diversified investment funds and U.S. Treasury bonds. But, unlike some other proposals, it would not allow blind trusts, and it would apply only to Congress, not the president or vice president.

The House and Senate Ethics committees would be tasked with identifying offenders and directing them to pay a fee of 10 percent of the investment. Those fines would be tracked on a public website, according to the legislation.

The legislation is meant to appeal to a broad swath of the House and address sticking points in past bills around enforcement and fines. It currently has 88 co-sponsors, and, according to Jayapal, Johnson has been “brow-beaten” into action on the issue as support mounts.

Lawmakers in recent Congresses have repeatedly introduced legislation to outlaw the trading of individual stocks while in office, arguing that members of the House and Senate have access to information that most members of the public lack.

Anger over congressional trading increased earlier this year after some lawmakers “bought the dip” before President Donald Trump announced a pause on tariffs. A 2012 law already bars members from trading on inside information. But it is rarely enforced, and lawmakers regularly flout its reporting requirements.

Public polling shows broad support for a congressional ban, particularly after lawmakers made a flurry of dubious trades at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transactions raised eyebrows but didn’t result in any findings of wrongdoing.

Both Trump and Johnson have backed the idea of curbing member stock trading in theory, although neither the House speaker nor Senate Majority Leader John Thune has publicly committed to bringing any proposal to the floor.

Banning members from trading is one way to help restore the public’s trust in Congress, proponents argue. Jayapal said the idea that members are lining their pockets while in office is only reinforced by provisions like the one senators slipped into the fiscal 2026 Legislative Branch appropriations bill earlier this week.

That provision would allow senators to sue for at least $500,000 each when federal investigators search their phone records without notifying them and would apply retroactively — meaning it could benefit Republican senators whose records were searched by former special counsel John L. “Jack” Smith in his probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. It passed the Senate and the House as part of a spending package this week and was signed into law by Trump on Wednesday. After blowback from House Republicans and Democrats, Johnson vowed to try to repeal the provision next week.

While many see momentum building on the stock trading issue, supporters remain skeptical after years of false starts. A Senate bill, led by Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, was marked up out of committee in July but hasn’t seen any action on the floor.

And some members are wary of leadership and eager to move quickly.

Luna said she has prepared discharge petitions tied to several different pieces of legislation that would rein in congressional stock trading. If progress stalls on the issue, she stands ready to file the one attached to the consensus bill led by Roy, she said. A discharge petition is a procedural tool that allows House members to trigger a vote on the floor over the objections of leadership, provided they can get to 218 signatures.

She had posted over the weekend that Johnson promised her a markup on the trading bill “as soon as we return and the government is reopened,” but Luna on Wednesday acknowledged a longer timeline.

“I was told that at first it’s going to be a hearing and then they’ll notice the markup,” she said when asked whether there was a miscommunication with the speaker’s office. “However, trust but verify.”

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