The money behind Washington, organized into stories anyone can read.

Every investigation

• The Margin Machine — Every wealth tracker publishes a net-worth number. None publish what the debt is. Only thirteen members of Congress borrow against their own portfolios — and one household holds 75% of it.
• The Money Against You — $2.38 billion was spent trying to defeat sitting members of Congress between 2018 and 2024. $1.12 billion was spent supporting them. The two parties absorbed the attacks in amounts 0.4% apart.
• The Double Insiders — A CEO bought $25M of his own collapsing stock. A congressman's accounts bought the same day. We checked how often that happens — 250 times since January 2025 — then asked who moves first. Nobody does.
• The Forced Sale: The Divestiture Rule Congress Won't Pass for Itself — A GovGreed Research working paper. The rule reformers want Congress to adopt already exists one branch over: executive officials sign ethics agreements that compel them to sell, on a clock they don't control. Frank Bisignano was given 120 days to shed his Fiserv stake and finished in 56 — four months before the stock fell 44% in a day, sparing him roughly $300M. He couldn't have timed it; the Senate's confirmation vote started the clock. The finding isn't the windfall. It's that the 278-T cannot tell a compelled exit from a voluntary one: Jared Isaacman was never required to divest Shift4 and intends to remain its largest shareholder, yet his filing shows the same shape of sale. The branch with the strict rule is the branch nobody can audit.
• The $5,000 Ceiling: Why Defense Money Is the Cheapest in Washington — A GovGreed Research working paper. The mental image of corrupt money is a defense contractor writing a check. Nine contractor PACs — Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, RTX, General Dynamics, L3Harris — spent $38.8M across 26,571 transactions over four cycles, and their largest single check in seven years is exactly $5,000. Across those nine plus six pharma and five oil PACs — 41,828 transactions — there is not one exception, and not one dollar of advertising. The crypto super PACs spent $133.1M in a single cycle, 100% advertising, largest single transaction $12,000,000. $40.1M of it went to one Senate seat, unseating the chairman who controlled crypto legislation — more than all nine defense PACs spent on the entire Congress. The control sits inside the same industry: Coinbase's own corporate PAC gave $120,000, max $2,900, zero ads. It isn't the industry. It's the filing category.
• The One Number They Have to Get Right — A GovGreed Research working paper. Every figure published about congressional wealth is an estimate, because the disclosure reports value in categories. Exactly one schedule breaks the rule: earned income must be exact to the dollar — expressly unlike every other financial interest on the same form. The reason is that it is the only schedule with a cap attached: House Rule XXV limits outside earned income to 15% of Executive Schedule Level II, $33,285 in 2025. A cap cannot be enforced against a bracket. Across 3,995 filings the split is a wall, not a gradient: 4,128 income rows 100% exact, 7,612 liability rows 100% bracketed, 179,023 assets bracketed. Only 2.2% of the disclosure is a number — and 6,001 asset lines have no upper bound at all, more than the 4,128 that carry one. The median exact figure is $7,399. Precision follows enforcement, not importance.
• The Goldman Rebuild — A Banking Committee senator sold his $1M–$5M Goldman Sachs stake, then bought it back across seven purchases — the first the same day Goldman's lobbyists filed on Dodd-Frank, the law his committee oversees.
• The Pelosi Options Machine — She bought 50 calls each on five companies spanning the AI trade — chips, clouds, power and diagnostics — then exercised all five into 25,000 shares instead of selling. Two legs gained 105% and 354%; the largest leg lost.
• The Deregulation Supercut: Every Rule Congress Killed in 2025 Had a Market Winner — A GovGreed Research working paper. In 2025 Congress used the filibuster-proof Congressional Review Act to nullify 16 federal regulations — methane, crypto reporting, appliance standards, California's vehicle-emissions waivers, coal and oil leasing. For 15 of the 16, the model flags a public-company winner; ExxonMobil is flagged across four, Chevron three. The executive branch held many of them. The pattern, not any single trade, is the finding.
• How Congress Got Rich: The Net Worth of the People Who Write the Rules, 2018–2025 — A GovGreed Research working paper on congressional wealth. The median member is worth about $2.1 million — roughly eleven times the typical American household — up from $1.5M in 2018, with the over-$50M tier nearly tripling (6→17). The rich list (Justice $1.04B, Scott, Issa, Pelosi) and the biggest climbers are both bipartisan. The honest finding: it's mostly markets and pre-existing fortunes, not trading — the median member's growth even trails a passive index hold. The scandal is the level, not the rate of return.
• The Defense Winners: The 2026 Spending Bills Named Their Beneficiaries, Line by Line — A GovGreed Research working paper. You don't have to guess who profits from a defense bill — the 2026 Consolidated Appropriations Act wrote it down by program: $3.9B Columbia-class and $2.7B Virginia-class submarines to Huntington Ingalls, $3.6B Black Hawks to Lockheed, $1.75B destroyers to General Dynamics, missiles to RTX. The same contractors sit in the portfolios of dozens of members on both sides — 28 hold Boeing, 23 Lockheed.
• The Committee Advantage: Members Who Trade the Sectors Their Committees Oversee — A GovGreed Research working paper on the cleanest conflict of interest in Congress. We score every member on committee alignment — the share of their trades in sectors their committees oversee. The bipartisan top: David McCormick (R-PA) 87% (Banking), John Hickenlooper (D-CO) 81%, Jack Reed (D-RI) 78% (Armed Services), Tina Smith (D-MN) 74%, Ron Wyden (D-OR) 56% (Finance). 23 members are above 50% — split 11 D, 11 R. Alignment is a structural conflict map, not proof of insider trading.
• The Greediness Index: Ranking Congress by How Hard It Trades — and How Much Richer It Got — A GovGreed Research working paper. We rank every member by a 0–100 Greediness score — trading frequency, volume, recency — and the top is bipartisan: Pelosi (98.7), Khanna (98.6), Gottheimer (98.6), McCaul (97.5). McCaul's ~$869M of volume is ~5,000× a member's $174K salary. Then we line it up against the members' own disclosures: net worth that rose ~$89M for Pelosi and ~8.6× for Mullin over seven years. Intensity, not wrongdoing — and net-worth growth is mostly markets, not trades.
• The Crypto Congress: Members Bought Crypto While Congress Deregulated It — A GovGreed Research working paper. In 2025 Congress used the Congressional Review Act to repeal the IRS crypto-broker reporting rule (HJRES.25) — and across the same year, 20 members disclosed buying crypto-linked stocks and ETFs (Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Robinhood, Bitcoin ETFs). Sen. David McCormick (R-PA), who sits on Senate Banking, bought the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF 22 times (~$1.14M). The buyers are bipartisan — and one Republican's COIN/MSTR buy landed two days before the resolution's committee report.
• The Foreign Influence Map: Who Pays American Firms to Lobby Washington for Foreign Governments — A GovGreed Research working paper on FARA. Since the records began, 7,066 American firms have registered to represent 17,694 foreign-principal relationships from 273 countries; 812 are active today. The all-time leaders are Japan, Canada and Mexico — but the live list is led by Japan and the Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE hold ~96 active relationships between them), brokered by a small set of K Street firms (Mercury, BGR, Akin Gump, Squire Patton Boggs).
• When Congress Moves as a Herd: 65 Times Members Bought the Same Stock at Once — A GovGreed Research working paper on convergence. We detect 65 clusters where three or more members of Congress bought the same stock inside a tight window — 25 with four or more, and every single one a buy. The biggest pulled seven members, from both parties, into Microsoft ($1.4–2.8M); a six-member bipartisan Apple cluster includes Nancy Pelosi. Committee alignment is zero: this is convergence, not coordination.
• Powering the Machine: How Congress Trades the AI Build-Out — A GovGreed Research working paper. Everyone watches whether Congress is buying NVIDIA — but the freshest money is one layer down, in the electricity, nuclear, and cooling the data centers need. ~91% of members' buying in Constellation, 68% in Vertiv, and 54% in Vistra came after 2024. The build-out's bottleneck became the portfolio's frontier.
• Government as Venture Capitalist: When Washington Buys Into the Companies It Funds — A GovGreed Research working paper on a new instrument of industrial policy: the federal government taking grants, loans, and now equity in public companies. ~$41.5B across seven deals — and in 2025 the DoD became a major shareholder of MP Materials, the first time the state owned a critical-minerals firm outright. The same companies Congress and the President hold.
• The $200 Fine: What Happens When Congress Files Its Stock Trades Late — A GovGreed Research working paper on STOCK Act compliance. 12.5% of congressional stock disclosures are filed late and 2,397 landed over a year after the trade — yet the penalty is a $200 fee, often waived, and no member has been prosecuted. Most file on time; the rule barely binds the rest.
• The President's Checkbook: He Holds the Contractors His Government Pays — A GovGreed Research working paper. Trump's Cabinet sold their stocks to take office (270+ sales); the President is legally exempt under §208 — so his disclosure still lists 588 companies, 243 of them active federal contractors his own administration pays.
• Who the U.S. Government Actually Pays: the $1.86 Trillion Contract Leaderboard — A GovGreed Research working paper mapping 441,165 federal contract awards to the public companies that won them — about $1.86 trillion. The Pentagon is 79% of it, the F-35 is the single biggest line, and the same contractors sit in the portfolios of 50+ members of Congress on both sides. Reproducible: queries included.