The Greediness Index

• Key findings
• The Greediness leaderboard is bipartisan: Pelosi (D) 98.7, Khanna (D) 98.6, Gottheimer (D) 98.6, McCaul (R) 97.5.
• Volume leader is McCaul (R-TX) at ~$869M; Khanna (D-CA) has the most trades, 24,822 — and ~$580M.
• A rank-and-file member earns $174,000/yr. McCaul's volume is ~5,000× that; Khanna's ~3,300×.
• Disclosed net worth 2018→2025 rose ~$89M for Pelosi, ~$63M (≈8.6×) for Mullin (R), ~$30M (≈4.5×) for Gottheimer (D).
• Caveat: “greediness” is intensity, not crime; net-worth growth is mostly market gains and outside assets, not trading profit.

1. Introduction: a score for intensity

“Congress trades a lot” is true but useless. To compare members you need a single, transparent number, and a single number forces a choice about what “a lot” means. We chose three ingredients that any reasonable observer would accept: how often a member buys (frequency), how much they move in dollars (volume), and how recently they were active (recency). Blend them on a 0–100 scale and you get the Greediness Index — a leaderboard of trading intensity that is reproducible, party-blind, and updatable every month.

One disclaimer belongs at the top, not the bottom. “Greediness” here is a measure of activity, not a verdict. A high score means a member trades frequently, in size, and recently — nothing about whether any trade was improper. We keep that line through the whole paper, including the part everyone actually wants, in §5: what happened to these members' net worth while they traded.

2. The formula

The Index is intentionally simple, so anyone can rebuild it. Each component is capped so a single dimension can't run away with the score, and recency decays linearly over two years:

Volume uses the midpoint of each trade's disclosed bracket, summed over a member's deduplicated trades; frequency counts purchases. The caps mean the very top of the table compresses — once you trade often enough and big enough, you max those components and the recency term separates you — which is why the leaders sit within two points of each other.

3. The leaderboard

Here is the top of Congress by Greediness. Read the party column first: the four highest scores are two Democrats, then a Democrat, then a Republican, and the top fifteen alternate throughout. This is not a one-party story.

Table 1 · The Greediness Index — top 15 (deduplicated trades)

Greediness = capped(frequency) + capped(volume) + recency, on deduplicated STOCK Act trades. Volume is summed bracket midpoints (gross turnover, not profit). Bipartisan throughout. Verified June 30, 2026. Look up any member on the Congress leaderboard.

3.1  How bipartisan is the greed?

The leaderboard's top is bipartisan, but so is the whole distribution. Of the 221 members who trade individual stocks at all, 65 score 50 or higher on the Index — and that group splits almost evenly: 30 Democrats, 34 Republicans. At the very top, 23 members score 70+, again from both parties. Whatever congressional stock-trading is, it is not a habit of one side: the propensity to trade often, large, and recently is distributed across the aisle to within four seats.

Figure 1 · The Greediness distribution (members who trade individual stocks)

Greediness computed for all 221 members with individual-stock trades. The 65 scoring 50+ split 30 D / 34 R — bipartisan to within four seats. Verified June 30, 2026.

4. The salary anchor

A number is only as meaningful as what you compare it to. The natural yardstick is the job itself: a rank-and-file member of Congress is paid $174,000 a year (leadership earns modestly more — the Speaker $223,500). Set the trading volume beside that salary and the scale becomes legible.

Figure 2 · Disclosed trading volume vs. a year's salary ($174K)

Volume is gross turnover, not profit — a member who buys and sells the same $1M position ten times shows $10M of volume and may have made nothing. We are not claiming these members earned multiples of their salary. The point is narrower and stranger: the financial activity flowing through these offices is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, while the office pays $174,000. The day job is a rounding error next to the portfolio.

5. Before and after: the net-worth trajectory

Trading intensity is a flow. Net worth is the stock it feeds — and Congress discloses that too, once a year, on the Personal Financial Disclosure (the annual Form 278, distinct from the trade reports). Each asset is reported in a value bracket; summing the midpoints gives an estimated total. We computed it for the most active traders at their earliest parseable filing (2018–2019) and their latest (2024–2025), and set the change against the salary they collected over the same span.

Table 2 · Disclosed net worth, earliest vs. latest filing (estimated, asset midpoints)

Estimated net worth = sum of disclosed asset-value bracket midpoints, one filing per member per year. “Then” = earliest parseable filing (2018–19), “Now” = latest (2024–25). Salary = years in span × $174K. Bipartisan. Not trading profit — see §6. Verified June 30, 2026.

6. What this does and does not show

This is the section that keeps the paper honest, so read it before quoting the last one. Net-worth growth is not trading profit, and we are not implying it is. Three forces drive most of it: (1) markets rose — the S&P 500 roughly doubled over 2018–2025, so any large equity portfolio grew substantially without a single clever trade; (2) outside wealth — spousal businesses (Pelosi), private companies (Mullin's plumbing firm, Hern's franchises), real estate, and inheritances sit in these totals and have nothing to do with congressional trading; and (3) bracket noise — disclosures report ranges, so a midpoint sum is an estimate with wide error bars.

So what does the table show? Two real things. First, scale: the people writing financial, tax, and antitrust law hold eight- and nine-figure portfolios, which is a structural fact about who serves and what conflicts they carry, independent of any trade. Second, trajectory: for the most active traders, wealth moved up and to the right far faster than the salary that nominally funds their public life. Neither is an accusation. Both are context the public rarely sees lined up in one place.

7. Discussion: why a recurring index

The Greediness Index is designed to be run again. Because it is a transparent formula over public data, it can be refreshed monthly — the leaderboard shifts as members trade, go quiet, or leave office, and the net-worth panel updates each summer when new annual disclosures post. Tracked over time it answers a question the headlines can't: not “did this one trade look bad,” but “which offices are consistently the most active, and is the wealth behind them growing faster than any salary can explain?” That is a slower, sturdier story than any single suspicious-looking trade, and it is the one the data actually support.

8. Limitations and caveats

• “Greediness” = intensity, not wrongdoing. A high score means frequent, large, recent trading. It is not a finding of insider trading or any impropriety.
• Volume is gross turnover. It double-counts round-trips and is not profit. We never present volume as earnings.
• Net worth is estimated, gross, and bracketed. It sums asset-value midpoints and does not net out liabilities (disclosed separately and sparsely). Treat the totals as order-of-magnitude, not precise.
• Net-worth growth is mostly not trading. Market appreciation, spousal and private-business assets, real estate, and inheritances dominate; attributing the change to congressional trading would be wrong.
• Coverage gaps. A few high-volume members (e.g. Khanna, McCaul) have annual filings whose asset detail is not yet machine-parsed, so they appear on the trading leaderboard but not the net-worth table. They are omitted, not excluded for cause.
• Deduplicated trades. All trade counts and volume use the deduplicated disclosure set to neutralize the raw feed's double-ingestion.

9. Conclusion

The Greediness Index puts a number on something everyone senses: a slice of Congress trades like a hedge fund. The leaderboard is bipartisan, the volumes run to hundreds of millions, and the salary that defines the job — $174,000 — is a rounding error against them. Line the index up against the members' own net-worth disclosures and the trajectory is steep, even after you strip out the market and the spouse's business. None of it, on its own, is a crime. All of it, taken together, is the reason the question won't go away.

Frequently asked

References & data sources

1. STOCK Act disclosures — congressional Periodic Transaction Reports, in GovGreed's Congress database; per-member history on any member page.
2. Personal Financial Disclosures — annual Form 278 filings (House & Senate), parsed into pfd_filings/pfd_assets.
3. Greediness formula — documented in full in §2 of this paper; consistent with the platform-wide definition.
4. Methodology — GovGreed Research: sources & methods.
5. Companion papers — The $200 Fine (who files late) · When Congress Moves as a Herd.
6. Illustration: GovGreed.

Keep pulling the thread

Not financial advice. All data from public federal disclosures.