When Darrell Issa first got rich, he sold car alarms. The kind of gadgets that go off at 2 a.m. in suburban driveways—plain, useful, and strangely profitable. He made a lot of money with that business before he even ran for Congress. The next part of the story is a different one.
NOTUS looked at recent financial disclosures and found that Issa has a median net worth of $282.4 million. Issa has been representing California in the House since 2001, with a short break. From the beginning to the end of his term, his stock portfolio is said to have made around $686,000 per month. It’s hard to deal with that number. When you write it down, it doesn’t seem so vague. Issa said that he is going to retire this year. His money isn’t going anywhere.
It’s not just about one congressman in the bigger picture. More than half of California’s congressional representatives have a net worth of at least $1 million. Many of them have a lot of money that lives in the stock market. This is the market that they help to regulate, fund, and sometimes even directly affect through the committees they serve on. Washington has been arguing about this structural conflict for years without coming to an agreement.
Rep. Gilbert Cisneros is one of the busiest traders in the delegation. In 2010, he won the $266 million Mega Millions jackpot. While he is on the House Armed Services Committee, he has big investments in defense companies like Boeing. A financial adviser is in charge of day-to-day trading, according to his office. That could be true. Even so, being so close is still awkward, and it’s hard not to notice how easily these lines are drawn.
Over 4,200 stock trades worth more than $59 million were made by Rep. Ro Khanna’s family last year. A lot of those assets are held in family trusts, which separates them somewhat but not completely. Khanna, in particular, has spent years pushing for a ban on stock trading in Congress and has introduced legislation that would make it illegal for lawmakers to own individual stocks. He is in that job and is in charge of a portfolio that is bigger than most Americans will ever see. That tension isn’t really hypocrisy. There’s more to it than that. This picture does show how hard it is to leave this system, though.
Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring this year and was Speaker of the House, has a median net worth of $187.7 million. A lot of that comes from the fact that her husband Paul Pelosi owns shares in Alphabet, Apple, and Roblox and invests in new businesses. Her spokesperson has said over and over that she doesn’t own any stocks and doesn’t trade. She has also changed her public stance. She used to defend trading in Congress by saying “we are a free-market economy,” but now she wants a ban.
Congress does require financial reports every year. Members report that the values of their assets range widely, starting at $15,001 and going up to $50 million or more. It’s like clear glass with a roof over it. Raihan Alam, a doctoral student at UC San Diego, co-wrote a report that says trading stocks in Congress hurts public trust in ways that go beyond the ethics headlines. “The U.S. for a long time has been seen as a poster child,” he stated. “What practices like stock trading show is that there are cracks in these institutions.”
It’s important to note that none of this is against the law. Indeed, that’s the point that critics keep making. Lawmakers can trade in areas that their own committee is responsible for without breaking any rules. There is no law that Issa and Cisneros have signed that would change that. It doesn’t look like they will before they leave office.
The stock market did well in the third quarter. The S&P 500 went up about 14%, even though AI investment bubbles and a fragile peace deal between the US and Iran caused a lot of uncertainty around the world. Most Americans only got a small boost to their 401(k). For someone like Darrell Issa, it was another month of beating the market and most of the country by an amount that is hard to explain.