He Says Members "Shouldn't Run From a Briefing to a Broker." His Bill's Own Sponsor Calls That Framing "Accurate but Misleading."

Ethics & Government Reform Source: Facebook Video MISLEADING

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Why this matters

Congressional stock trading is one of the few issues with genuine bipartisan support for reform, and Langworthy has built part of his brand around it: “I’m not a millionaire, and I don’t trade stocks,” he says, casting himself as a clean alternative. He is a real cosponsor of a real bill. But at the same committee hearing where that bill was teed up for a floor vote, its own lead sponsor was asked, point-blank, whether members can still sell individual stock under the bill — and said the honest description of “yes, as much as you want” is “accurate.” That single exchange is the difference between what Langworthy’s video implies and what the bill he’s promoting actually does.

The claim

Source: Facebook video posted to Rep. Langworthy’s official page, July 21, 2026 (16 hours before this site’s screenshot)

Caption:

“Members of Congress should not be getting rich trading stocks based on insider knowledge. We are here to serve our country, not pad our portfolios. Since day one, I have…” [caption truncated by Facebook’s “See more”]

Video audio (transcribed by this site directly from the post; see Sources):

“I’m Congressman Nick Langworthy. I’m not a millionaire, and I don’t trade stocks. This is about public service, not cashing in on insider tips. Members shouldn’t run from a briefing to their broker. I’m fighting to ban congressional stock trading because it’s dead wrong.”

The Facts

1. The cosponsorship is real, verified against the authoritative roster. Per the official govinfo BILLSTATUS record (not a secondary aggregator), Langworthy was added as a cosponsor of H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act, on January 13, 2026 — one day after Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chairman of the House Administration Committee, introduced it. The bill has 121 cosponsors, all but two Republican. It was reported out of House Administration on February 3, 2026, and the House Rules Committee approved it for floor consideration on July 20, 2026.

2. What the bill actually restricts — and what it doesn’t. This site pulled the official captions from the July 20, 2026 Rules Committee hearing where Steil testified as the bill’s sponsor. Questioned directly by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO), Steil confirmed, on the record:

  • The bill bans members, spouses, and dependents from buying new individual shares of stock.
  • The bill does not ban selling individual stock. A member may sell as much stock as they want, subject only to a minimum 7 days’ advance public notice before the sale.
  • Under the bill, House rules on crypto holdings, private-placement stock, industry-specific mutual funds, and bonds are all unchanged — none of those are newly restricted.

3. The bill’s own sponsor calls the “you can still sell” description accurate. This is the load-bearing exchange:

Neguse: “You’re allowed to sell as much stock as you would like as a member of Congress under this bill. Is that wrong?”

Steil: “I think it’s insufficient to describe it that way, but what you said is accurate but misleading.”

Neguse: “Accurate but misleading, yes.”

Steil: “Correct. Yes, it is accurate.”

Whatever “misleading” is doing in Steil’s answer, “accurate” is doing the work that matters here: the bill’s own author agrees, on the record before the committee, that members remain free to sell individual stock at will. That directly narrows Langworthy’s framing that the bill stops members from “running to their broker” — selling is the one transaction his own bill does not stop.

4. Neguse raised a real, non-hypothetical example of pre-crisis selling. Pressing Steil on why the notice requirement adequately addresses the concern, Neguse said: “This isn’t a hypothetical. A Republican senator, 7, 8, 9 days before the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest, sold millions of dollars of stock. Under this bill, that would not be illegal.” Neguse did not name the senator in this exchange, and this site has not independently confirmed he was referring to a specific individual — but the timeline he describes (a multimillion-dollar stock sale roughly a week to nine days before the COVID-19 market crash, by a Republican senator) matches the widely reported February 13, 2020 stock sales by then-Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), which became a national story at the time. This site is not asserting that Neguse named Burr or any other individual — only that the pattern he described under the bill’s own notice-based framework would not have been prevented by it, per Steil’s own answer in the same exchange (“of course, they would have provided a minimum of 7 days advance notice”).

5. The bill Langworthy is promoting also carries a Voter ID mandate, unrelated to stock trading, that his post does not mention — and this is not a separate bill folded in by the floor rule, it is literally Section 3 of the same document. This site pulled the actual bill text: the House Rules Committee Print of H.R. 7008 (RCP2, July 17, 2026) contains, verbatim, “SEC. 3. REQUIRING VOTERS TO PROVIDE PHOTO IDENTIFICATION,” adding a new Section 303A to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Sections 1-2 are the stock-trading restrictions; Section 3 is the photo-ID mandate — one bill, one document. The accepted forms of ID it lists are a state driver’s license or ID card, a U.S. passport, a DoD or VA photo ID, and tribal ID — no college ID, which matches what Steil confirmed under questioning: the bill’s federal photo-ID standard is stricter than his own home state’s. Wisconsin’s constitutional voter-ID law (which he called “reasonably good”) accepts a college ID; this bill’s standard does not. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) publicly objected to this pairing the same week, writing that Republicans “say we are voting on an ‘insider trading’ bill, but have snuck in massive SAVE Act-style voter suppression measures to it,” and announcing she would vote no. The House approved the procedural rule for floor consideration, H.Res. 1438, by a 214-211 vote (Roll Call No. 254, July 21, 2026, 2:39 PM). Langworthy’s video does not mention Section 3 at all — the post is framed entirely as a clean anti-corruption message.

6. Also unaddressed by the bill, per the same hearing: members remain free to bet on prediction markets. The Senate banned that practice for its own members unanimously by voice vote in April 2026; the House Administration Committee (Steil’s committee) has jurisdiction over the same question for the House, and Steil acknowledged support for similar restrictions “in principle” but did not include them in this bill.

Update — August 2026: The Bill Passed, and the Poll He Is Now Citing

Added after an August 4, 2026 post from Langworthy’s verified congressional page. This section resolves the open question flagged below about final passage, and examines the polling graphic he posted.

1. The bill passed the House. That question is now closed.

The entry previously noted that final House passage had not been confirmed. It has been. H.R. 7008 passed the House 232-198 on July 22, 2026 (Roll Call 280). Langworthy voted Yea. A motion to recommit failed 211-218 immediately before (Roll Call 279); Langworthy voted Nay. His August 4 statement that “it passed the House and now it’s time for the Senate to act” is accurate.

2. The poll he cites asks about a broader ban than his bill enacts

The August 4 post reads:

“Americans from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support banning members of Congress from trading stocks because they believe like I do that it’s a clear conflict of interest. I’ve been fighting to get this done from day one. It passed the House and now it’s time for the Senate to act.”

The attached graphic shows support of 86% national, 87% Republican, 88% Democratic, 81% independent. Those numbers are not in dispute here. The question wording, printed on his own graphic, is:

“Do you favor or oppose the proposal to prohibit Members of Congress (in the House and Senate) and the family that lives with them, from trading stocks in individual companies. They would still be allowed to buy or sell shares of mutual funds or index funds…?”

Set that against the bill’s operative text, quoted directly from the House-passed version (new 5 U.S.C. § 13152):

What the bill does
Buying“no covered individual may purchase a covered investment”
Selling“No covered individual shall sell a covered investment, unless a notice of intent to sell… is publicly disclosed at least 7 calendar days, and no more than 14 calendar days, prior to the sale”

In plain language: respondents were asked about prohibiting trading in individual stocks. The bill prohibits buying them and permits selling them on advance public notice. That is not the same policy, and the 86% figure measures the broader one.

The fair counterweight, and it is a real one. A 7-day advance notice requirement is a meaningful constraint, not a free pass. A member who learns something in a closed briefing cannot quietly dump a position that afternoon; they must announce the intent to sell a week ahead, in public, and that announcement is itself a market signal. This entry does not claim the notice provision is meaningless. It claims the poll measured a prohibition and the bill delivers an asymmetry.

What happens to a member who sells without giving notice

The bill’s enforcement section (new 5 U.S.C. § 13153) creates a civil fee, not a criminal penalty. The fee is the sum of two parts:

“(1) $2,000 or ten percent of the value of the transaction in the covered investment which violates section 13152, whichever is greater; and (2) the net gain realized, if any, from the covered investment during the period beginning on the most recent date on which the individual became a covered individual and ending on the date of disposition…”

Two collection provisions give this real force. The Member pays personally, including when the violation was caused by a spouse or dependent child. And § 13153(c) bars paying the fee from the Members’ Representational Allowance, the Senators’ Official Personnel and Office Expense Account, or campaign contributions. The money goes to the Treasury’s general fund. For an improper purchase, the member can also be forced to sell the investment; there is no equivalent unwind for an improper sale.

How the formula behaves, worked from the text:

Undisclosed saleFee under § 13153(b)
$10M sale, $8M gain accrued in office10% ($1M) plus the $8M gain = $9M
$10M sale, made to avoid a loss, no gain$1M (the 10% term only)
$50,000 sale, made to avoid a loss$5,000
$15,000 sale, made to avoid a loss$2,000 (the floor)

In plain language: on a profitable sale the disgorgement term is designed to take essentially the whole gain, and that is aggressive. But the term reaches gains realized, not losses avoided — and avoiding a loss is the classic fact pattern in these cases. Selling ahead of bad news therefore collapses the fee to the 10% term. The $2,000 floor governs only transactions below $20,000, the exact point at which the 10% term overtakes it.

Two limits on reading too much into that. First, this entire schedule applies only to a member who skips the notice. A member who files it may sell any amount and owes nothing under this bill. Second, and importantly, the fee is an additional civil layer, not a ceiling. Trading on material nonpublic information remains securities fraud under existing law and the STOCK Act, which is what produced a 26-month prison sentence in the Collins case described below. Nothing here should be read as “the penalty for congressional insider trading is now $2,000.”

Enforcement is discretionary: the fee is imposed “at the direction of the supervising ethics office,” which “may consider mitigating or aggravating circumstances.” The section takes effect 180 days after enactment.

3. Who the bill covers, and who it does not

From the bill’s definitions section (new 5 U.S.C. § 13151), “covered individual” means:

“(A) A Member of Congress… (B) A dependent child… or a spouse of a Member of Congress.”

That is the entire list. This site searched the full House-passed text: the words “President,” “Vice President,” and “executive branch” appear zero times. The bill reaches the legislative branch only.

This is a design choice with consequences, and it is worth stating plainly because the bill is being promoted as a general answer to officials profiting from nonpublic information. It is not. A Cabinet secretary, the Vice President, or the President could buy and sell individual stocks the day H.R. 7008 became law and be entirely unaffected by it.

One documented, non-allegational illustration. In July 2026, Trump Media announced “Truth API,” a paid data feed selling Wall Street trading firms millisecond-speed access to Truth Social posts ahead of ordinary push notifications. The company’s interim CEO said markets “already move on Truth Social posts” and that the company expects the product to become “a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue.” President Trump owns roughly 41% of Trump Media. This is a publicly announced commercial product, not an accusation, and nothing in H.R. 7008 addresses it.

What this entry is not doing. A number of contested insider-trading allegations involving executive-branch figures were in circulation during 2026. This site takes no position on any of them, adopts none of them, and none is necessary to the point above, which rests entirely on the bill’s own definitions section.

4. Local context: the Collins case, and why it is context rather than a finding

Western New York has the most prominent recent congressional insider-trading prosecution in the country. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY-27), whose district covered the Buffalo area where Langworthy now keeps his Clarence district office, sat on the board of Innate Immunotherapeutics. In June 2017 he learned from the White House lawn that the company’s multiple sclerosis drug had failed its trial and called his son, Cameron Collins. Cameron sold and tipped Stephen Zarsky, the father of his fiancée. The two avoided more than $700,000 in losses. Collins pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and to lying to the FBI, was sentenced to 26 months in January 2020, and was pardoned by President Trump in December 2020.

Under H.R. 7008’s definitions, neither Cameron Collins (an adult son, not a dependent child) nor Stephen Zarsky (a prospective in-law) would be a covered individual.

This entry does not present that as a loophole, and readers should understand why. Collins’s conduct was already illegal under existing securities law, and he was prosecuted and convicted for it. H.R. 7008 is a holding-and-trading restriction, not an anti-tipping statute; it was never designed to reach that conduct. And no stock-trading ban could realistically forbid an adult child from trading their own money. The Collins case is offered as local context for why this subject matters in this district, not as evidence of a defect in this bill.

What This Does — and Doesn’t — Show

Established from primary sources: Langworthy’s cosponsorship (govinfo BILLSTATUS, official roster); the bill’s own sponsor’s on-record characterization of what it does and doesn’t restrict (this site’s direct transcript of the July 20, 2026 Rules Committee hearing); the bundled voter-ID rule vote (214-211, H.Res. 1438); AOC’s public objection (her own verified social post).

Not claimed: that Langworthy personally has traded stock, that he supports the voter-ID rider specifically, or that the Republican senator in Neguse’s example was definitively named. This entry does not allege wrongdoing by Langworthy; it documents a gap between his description of the bill’s effect and the bill’s sponsor’s own on-record description of the same provision.

Added in the August 2026 update, and equally not claimed: that any executive-branch official has committed insider trading — this site adopts no such allegation and none is needed for the scope finding, which rests on the bill’s own definitions section; that the bill’s 7-day notice requirement is meaningless, which it is not; that H.R. 7008 contains a defect because it would not have covered Cameron Collins or Stephen Zarsky, since that conduct was already criminal, was prosecuted, and lies outside what a holding-and-trading restriction is designed to do.

Resolved since the last update: H.R. 7008 passed the House 232-198 on July 22, 2026 (Roll Call 280), Langworthy voting Yea. His statement that the bill passed the House is accurate.

Questions This Raises

  1. Langworthy’s video frames “running from a briefing to a broker” as the practice his bill stops. Since his own bill’s sponsor has confirmed selling remains legal with 7 days’ notice, does Langworthy support closing that gap — for example, by backing the broader buy-and-sell ban (the Roy-Neguse approach, with 140 cosponsors) that Neguse offered to substitute in?
  2. Why does a bill billed as a clean insider-trading fix also carry Section 3 voter-ID provisions stricter than Langworthy’s own state’s requirements? Does he support that pairing, or just the stock-trading piece?
  3. Does Langworthy support extending the Senate’s April 2026 unanimous prediction-market ban to the House, given his own bill leaves that loophole open too?

Sources

Added in the August 2026 update:

Note: This entry documents publicly available information: a public Facebook video, the official cosponsor record, and a direct transcript of committee testimony. It does not allege criminal conduct or speculate about Langworthy’s motives. The characterization of the bill’s sell-side provisions rests on the bill sponsor’s own on-record answers, not on this site’s interpretation. The August 2026 update’s scope finding rests on the bill’s own definitions section, quoted verbatim from the House-passed text. The Collins matter is a matter of public record: a guilty plea, a sentence, and a presidential pardon, described here without inference about anyone else.

Last updated: August 6, 2026 (added the House passage result, the August 4 polling post, the bill’s coverage scope, and local context; the July claim-by-claim findings and the MISLEADING verdict are unchanged).