About this site
Methodology
The Money Trail tracks federal spending and the disclosed stock trades of Members of Congress, then surfaces the cases where those overlap.
What this site covers
3 enacted FY26 appropriations bills (H.R. 7148, H.R. 7147, H.R. 6938), representing $1.50T in discretionary spending. 8,545 stock-trade disclosures from 119th Congress members across both chambers. 629 members (536 current plus 93 who departed since the start of the 118th Congress). 14 congressional committees with significant jurisdiction over defense or health sectors.
The dashboard, bill pages, recipient pages, member pages, and committee pages are all built from the data described below.
Where the data comes from
| Dataset | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Member stock trades (House) | House Stock Watcher periodic transaction reports | Public PTRs filed under the STOCK Act |
| Member stock trades (Senate) | Senate EFD periodic transaction reports | E-filed only; ~2% of recent Senate filings are scanned paper documents not yet ingested |
| Congressional roster | @unitedstates/congress-legislators | Canonical machine-readable source; we include former members whose terms ended on or after 2024-01-01 |
| Bill text and votes | congress.gov | Direct from the legislative branch |
| Appropriations details | Senate and House Appropriations Committee conference summaries; CRS reports | Cross-referenced where possible |
| Federal recipient amounts | USAspending.gov | FY24 and FY25 used as proxies where FY26 data isn't yet posted |
Every claim that depends on a specific data point should trace back to one of these sources. Where editorial findings reference specific events (BARDA program changes, lobbying patterns), we cite the underlying article or government release on the relevant bill page.
How conflict-of-interest flagging works
A disclosed trade is flagged "Direct conflict" when the Member sits on a committee with significant jurisdiction over that trade's sector. For defense, that's 8 committees: House and Senate Armed Services, Appropriations Defense subcommittees, Intelligence committees, and Foreign Affairs/Relations committees. For health, 6 committees: House Energy & Commerce, House Ways & Means, House and Senate Appropriations Labor-HHS-Education subcommittees, Senate Finance, and Senate HELP.
We make one editorial choice worth surfacing: leadership roles (Chair, Ranking Member, Vice Chair) get more prominent visual treatment than ordinary committee membership. Whether to weight a chair's trade differently from a freshman's is a judgment call, and we make it explicitly visible.
A flag does not imply legal violation. Members are permitted to hold and trade individual securities under current federal law, including via managed accounts. The flag is an analytical lens, not an accusation.
What this site doesn't cover (yet)
Entitlement spending.
The dashboard tracks discretionary appropriations only. The largest federal payments to private companies — Medicare Advantage capitation, Medicaid managed care, prescription drug reimbursement — flow through CMS as entitlement spending under existing statute, not annual appropriations. UnitedHealth Group receives roughly $152 billion per year from CMS this way; we currently show only its $344.9M in HHS contracts. Closing this gap is in progress.
Historical committee membership.
When a former member like Sen. Markwayne Mullin (departed March 2026) shows up on a Recipient page, we don't yet flag his trades against his then-committee seats. Those trades are still visible; the conflict badge just doesn't fire.
Scanned Senate filings.
About 21 of 993 Senate PTRs in 2025 were filed on paper and exist only as scanned images. Those aren't yet in the dataset.
Recipient pages for health-sector companies.
Defense primes have full Recipient profiles with contract data and narrative; pharma and insurance companies don't yet, so their names appear as plain text in some views rather than as links.
Questions you might have
Are you cherry-picking which trades to surface?
No. We ingest every PTR available from House Stock Watcher and Senate EFD for the years we cover, then filter by ticker only at display time. The unfiltered trade data is in the GitHub repo.
Why isn't [company X] flagged?
Probably one of three reasons: it's not publicly traded (General Atomics), it doesn't trade under a ticker we track yet, or no Member disclosed trading it during 2025. Tickers tracked: defense — LMT, RTX, GD, BA, NOC, HII, LHX. Health — PFE, MRK, JNJ, LLY, ABBV, BMY, MRNA, UNH, CVS, CI, ELV, HUM.
Isn't all this already public?
Yes. The contribution here is aggregating it into one place with consistent cross-linking, and surfacing the patterns (committee jurisdiction × disclosed trade × recipient) that are tedious to compute manually.
How current is this?
Bill data covers FY26 appropriations enacted as of February 2026. Trade disclosures run through May 2026 for the House and 2025 for the Senate (e-filed). Roster reflects members serving as of the most recent ingest.
Who built this?
[placeholder — attribution to be added]
See also