Excitement in artificial intelligence has pushed big tech stocks, and by extension the entire stock market, to record highs.
Now, many experts worry about a bubble in the market and major losses if it bursts. That has a lot of investors looking for safer havens to store their cash and preserve their recent stock gains. In October, U.S. Rep. Tony Wied followed the trend and put between $1 million and $5 million into safer treasury bills.
Federal law requires members of Congress to report when they buy and sell assets like stocks and bonds.
Wied is a Republican who represents the state’s 8th Congressional District in northeastern Wisconsin. The most recent addition to Wisconsin’s congressional delegation, he reported between $1.6 million and $6.5 million in investment moves from October, by far the largest being a purchase of U.S. treasury bills, considered to be a slow-growing but safe asset.
A businessman from De Pere who was elected to his seat by a wide margin in 2024, he formerly owned a gas station chain in the Green Bay area. Like every other member of Congress, his seat will be up for grabs this year in the midterm elections. Wied has said publicly he plans to seek reelection.
His October periodic transaction report — the document he’s required to file with the Clerk of the House about 45 days after he, his spouse or dependent children buy or sell a financial asset like a stock that’s worth more than $1,000 — is two pages long and lists 11 transactions.
A spokesperson for the congressman’s office said his investments are “solely managed through an independent financial advisor” and that the congressman doesn’t have a role in those decisions.
“All of his trades are reported monthly to the House Ethics committee in accordance with current law and congressional ethics guidelines,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Badger Project.
Many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle want to ban all members of Congress from trading individual stocks, because of the advantage federal politicians have over the average investor and the potential conflict of interest. Through their position in government, federal politicians often receive private and confidential information affecting the economy. That information can be very lucrative when buying and selling stocks.
In December, dozens of former U.S. House members signed a letter advocating for the Restore Trust in Congress Act. The bill was introduced in September and seeks to prohibit members of Congress, their spouses and children from owning and trading stocks.
The letter highlights the surge in stock trading in April 2025 before and after President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies were enacted and then partially rescinded, which briefly crashed the stock market. The bill is one of many recent attempts to put a stop to congressional trading.
Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, usually on opposite ends of votes, are the only two members of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation who currently appear as co-sponsors on the bill, which has yet to make it to the House floor for a vote.
The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.
