The individual members of Congress have not only abused its power to make trades on stocks, but they have also displayed significant conflicts of interests that haven’t resulted in any consequences for the members and the ban on stock trading is extremely needed. According to a paper published in ScienceDirect by Serkan Karadas and Minh Schlosky who are both professors at the University of Illinois in the Department of Economics the members of Congress “are privy to non-public material information due to their official positions, and they also generate such information through their legislative actions(Karadas and Schlosky, 2025).” Not only do they have access to this information but they do make trades based upon it and their trades outperform the general market. They also regulate the very markets that they are making trades in, or that they already own stocks in so that is yet another way that they have an advantage over anyone else who invests in the markets. The current bill that would ban stock trading even has a bonus that according to Benjamin Guggenheim, a congressional reporter from Politico, “lawmakers would be able to take advantage of a rare perk generally not available to the public, which would allow them to defer taxes on the sale of prohibited securities (Guggenheim, 2025).” The lawmakers are still ensuring that their pockets stay fat, but this bill still is extremely important to pass because it will eliminate the insider trading that is currently being done by many members of Congress. Guggenheim also writes that a member whose wife traded steel stocks after he was privy to inside information and then a “committee found no evidence he knowingly caused his wife to act on inside information(Guggenheim, 2025).” This was a house committee that was made up of house members who had almost certainly made trades based on inside information and therefore would be unlikely to find that he would be in the wrong. This bill to ban stock trading needs to pass so that politicians have one less tool to take advantage of their unique situation to enrich themselves instead of simply working for their constituents.