Which members of Congress hold stocks their committees’ agencies just awarded?

Three separate public records have to line up. A member of Congress disclosed a trade in a company, or reports holding it. A federal agency awarded that company a contract. And the member sits on a committee or subcommittee with jurisdiction over that agency. Miss any one of the three and there is no row.

The Congress Trade Score is a 0–100 measure of how closely those records sit together. It weighs the member’s role on the committee, the gap between the trade date and the award date, the size of the position against that member’s usual trade, and how large the contract is relative to the company. It is a measure of proximity between disclosed facts, and nothing else.

Members of Congress may lawfully own and trade stocks, and these trades are disclosed under the STOCK Act. This page reports the proximity of public records — a disclosed trade, a public committee assignment and a public contract award — and draws no conclusion of wrongdoing. Proximity is not causation.

A periodic transaction report carries a transaction date and a disclosure date, and they can be up to 45 days apart. Both are shown on every row, because the second is when the trade became public and the first is when it happened. Reading one as the other would misstate the sequence.

Congressional disclosure reports a band rather than an exact number — $1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, and so on. Every dollar figure attached to a trade on this page is the midpoint of the disclosed band, and it is labelled as an estimate wherever it appears.

Contract values are the total obligated amount on the award record published by USAspending.gov, the federal government’s own spending database. Each row links straight to that record, so the number on the page can be checked against the source in one click.

Committee assignments come from the public congressional roster, including subcommittee seats and each member’s title. The mapping from a committee to the agencies it oversees or funds is maintained by our editorial team and versioned, and every row records which version of that mapping was used to judge it.

It does not tell you why a trade was made, what anyone understood at the time, or whether a contract and a trade have anything to do with one another. Members of Congress may lawfully own and trade stocks. This page reports that two public records sit close together in time and subject, and leaves the reader to make of that what they will.

The screen is rebuilt every Friday after the close. Rows are also re-checked against their original sources on a rolling schedule, and a row whose supporting record changes is corrected or removed automatically, with the change logged.