Chip Roy · TranslatePolitics.com

House of Representatives

Stop Insider Trading Act

2026-07-22

“I want to thank my friend for his work on this stock trading ban. I am proud of this legislation. There is a bipartisan problem with insider trading in Congress. Members should serve the public, not their portfolios. This bill is a step forward. I would prefer a divestiture approach, but this is still good. I hope everyone will support it. I think there should be a straight vote on this bill. I will keep pushing for that.”

Official Congressional Record

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Wisconsin, Chairman Steil, for his incredible work on this, his leadership, his friendship, and making sure that we are here today and getting this done. It has been a partnership I have been happy to engage in. I am proud of the legislation that we put forward. Let me say that again to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: I am proud of the legislation that we put forward. It is, in fact, good legislation. Let's back up 1 minute and talk about the problem. Right here, according to data I have got right now, 11,000 trades totaling between $600 million and $900 million of legislators over the last year. We have got one Member, a Democrat, $79 million of 406 trades; one man, a Republican, $75 million on 1,000 trades. A Democrat, $55 million on 3,923 trades. I could keep going on a bipartisan basis. I want to make clear that it is a bipartisan problem. I want to take a minute to say that we should recognize the bipartisan nature of the work that it took to get here, even though there is some disagreement here now. I have got friends on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Morelle, Seth Magaziner, and others I have been working with closely to try to advance this cause, and I want to thank them because they have worked in good faith to try to address this issue. I want to be clear to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I have often heard excuses. It says: I have a right to trade equities. I have a right to trade stocks. Let me be very clear: You do not have that right. There is no such right guaranteed in the Constitution. It is a privilege to serve in the United States Congress. When you come to Congress, you are supposed to set that aside. You are supposed to come here and serve. You come here for 2 years, 4 years, 6 years, 8 years--preferably not 40. You set down your personal interests, and you serve. Unfortunately, a lot of Members have been violating the spirit of that. That is why we are here today. We passed legislation in 2012 that made a lot of this transparent. Today, we have legislation on the floor that I am proud of, that would stop the ability of Members of Congress to acquire equities and would have significant transparency and presale requirements before you can sell equities you hold. Yes, I had legislation that would have required divestiture. I prefer that approach, but you have to build a coalition in a body. I think this is a giant step forward. I wish my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and my colleagues on this side of the aisle would recognize that and praise it. If we did that, it would be night and day in this body if people were not allowed to acquire Microsoft while you are voting on technology; acquire Lockheed when you are voting on Defense; acquire pharma or Big Insurance when you are voting on healthcare policies when you are supposed to be focusing on the American people and not focusing on your portfolio. That is where we should be as a body. I am proud that we are bringing this legislation forward today. I hope that everybody will support it, regardless of which side of the aisle you are on. Obviously, I am the lead author also of the SAVE America Act. That legislation has been offered on the back of this bill. I think my colleagues on the other side of the aisle should support it. I don't think they are supporting it for a lot of political reasons. I am not going to debate that here because right now we are talking about this bill addressing stock trading. I will say one thing that I think merits being said: I think we should be having a straight up-or-down vote on this stock trading bill. That is what I think. I think my friends who worked in good faith to do that deserve that on both sides of the aisle. I am going to end up voting for this because I support both measures. I am not done this year demanding that we have a straight up-or-down vote on stock trading. You can't, whether you are on this or that side of the aisle, hide behind the SAVE America Act for your opposition to what we need to do to change the culture of this institution. Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Steil and my friends who I worked with on this.

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House of Representatives

National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2027

2026-07-15

“The United Nations works against American interests. We should not give them money. The United States can handle problems on its own. Other countries are afraid of us. They are not afraid of the United Nations. I want the United States to stop funding the United Nations.”

“The United Nations does bad things. It lets terrorists join it. It takes the side of terrorists against us. The peacekeepers do bad things and no one stops them. The United Nations is always against the United States. We give it most of its money. But it takes the side of the worst countries that hurt people. It tells us what to do. We should not listen to it. We can help people without the United Nations. My dad had polio. We can fight diseases without the United Nations. We should not give our money to an organization that hurts us.”

Official Congressional Record

Madam Chair, I note that it is just not enough for us to say that they can do better. This is an organization that has too often allowed terrorist infiltration within its own entities and sided with terrorist organizations directly against us and our allies. I have seen repeated reports of misconduct involving United Nations peacekeeping operations and too little accountability for those failures. We act as if the United States is not capable of working on unilateral, bilateral, and other bases to be able to do all the great things we want to do around the world. My dad is a polio survivor. There are a lot of things that we can do to try to make sure we are eradicating these things around the world. We don't necessarily need a bureaucratic organization that its entire organizational structure and bias is structured against us, despite the fact that we fund the overwhelming majority of its operations. The United Nations has been operating against our interests. We are asking American taxpayers to continue to take those dollars and give them to an entity that has, in its open statements to the world, been against our interests so many times, time and time again, including siding with some of the worst countries on the Human Rights Council and the biggest abusers of human rights. The United Nations is put and exalted as somehow being those that we should listen to rather than the United States. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

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“The United Nations takes taxpayer money. It does not help America. It attacks our friends. It does not deserve taxpayer money. I want to stop sending taxpayer money to the United Nations. I want to stop sending taxpayer money to the United Nations.”

Official Congressional Record

Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman from Florida for his strong work on making reforms to this appropriations package. He did it in the previous Congress last year. He is doing it again this year. There have been a number of significant reforms that he deserves credit for, and I wanted that to be clear when I am offering amendments to change the text. I would note there are still things in the appropriations process that I am not fond of using taxpayer money for, and the United Nations is one of those things. The amendment that I am offering here would prohibit any funds in the bill from being made available to the United Nations at all. The bill continues to fund millions of dollars for the United Nations, despite longstanding concerns over anti-Israel bias, corruption, peacekeeper misconduct, institutional failure, and ways in which the United Nations operates on a regular basis in direct contradiction to the interests of the United States. That is undeniably true for observers of the United Nations, particularly over the last couple of decades and in recent years. When you are a nation that is $40 trillion in debt, when you are a nation that is trying to figure out how to fund the basics of government and find the dollars that we need to secure the Nation with a strong defense, to modernize our military, to ensure border security, all the things that we need to do while we are still racking up debt to the tune of--by the way, paying for interest on the debt to the tune of over a trillion dollars a year, spending more on interest than we are on our own national defense, it strikes me as an inappropriate use of taxpayer money to continue to send that money to an entity that has been working in such negative ways with respect to our interests as a nation. Again, I applaud the chairman for all of his great work on things like UNRWA, working in collaboration with me and others on trying to remove that funding--it was very important--the United Nations Human Rights Council abomination, the United Nations Population Fund, other things that I know that the gentleman has been working on. To be very clear, I am not trying to impugn the bill in any way from that perspective. I just wish to go further. I think it is important that we pull the funds from an entity operating against our interests. It has repeatedly failed to earn the confidence of the American people. It has stood up in solidarity with the worst and most evil countries in the world against our interests and dared to wag their finger at the United States, built on the back of our funding and generosity and, by the way, real estate, to give them a platform to target us and to target our interests, in addition to constantly and consistently going after our friends in Israel. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

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