By Brian Hamilton
July 31, 2026, 6:18 pm EDT
Nearly 240 years after drafting the Constitution, the Founding Fathers still seem to have gotten far more right than wrong. In the main, our country is formed on ideas that still work.
But there are some things the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate. Major technological developments like the personal computer were unforeseeable in the 18th century. So, too, was the current status quo in Congress, where members get rich by staying in office.
The Founders were builders, not leeches. They didn’t want to stay in public office for the entirety of their careers. Public service was a short-term contribution of a private citizen to their communities and country.
Recall that, after the American Revolution, some encouraged George Washington to assume the role of king, since he basically had control of the military. To his everlasting credit, he rejected that notion. This was noted by no less than the king of England, who said that, upon forgoing royalty, Washington would be “the greatest man in the world.”
Needless to say, we are short a few Washingtons these days.
To date, more than 300 legislators have served for more than 30 years in Congress. Some 70% of the current members were career politicians before they made it to Washington. No Founder would have even thought to consider laws around term limits because they couldn’t have fathomed hanging out well beyond their welcome, all the while depending on the government dole for their salary.
The natural question is, why would legislators want to stick around for so long?
It turns out that, since 2004, the top 100 wealth gainers in Congress have averaged a 114% increase in net worth while in office, according to a recent Ballotpedia study. During the same period, the median U.S. household saw its inflation-adjusted net worth decline by nearly 1%. That means that for every $1 of wealth the average American lost, Congress’s top 100 gained $121. Wow. Today, at least 30% of senators are estimated to be worth more than $10 million, despite their taxpayer-funded base salary being just $174,000.
How is this possible?
One obvious explanation is that these politicians are privy to information that average Americans aren’t, yet they are still permitted to own and trade individual stocks. The 2012 Stock Act, which requires members of Congress to report stock trades worth more than $1,000 within a 45-day window, does nothing to curb legislators’ trading.
You would hope that they would want to act in the interest of the country without the appearance of personal gain. However, an investigation conducted by a consortium of news organizations that analyzed nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports identified 78 members of Congress who violated the Stock Act.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always thought that you were supposed to make money from taking risks and adding value. It seems these guys are simply trading on their influence and knowledge. I think most Americans would be shocked to know how the system actually works in favor of the politicians.
While running for president in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) targeted President Lyndon B. Johnson, who added millions of dollars to his family’s fortunes while in Washington. Goldwater said that “small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.” Unfortunately, he was spot on.
There have been dozens of bills introduced this year to restrict insider trading by federal legislators. The most recent is the Stop Insider Trading Act, a Republican-sponsored bill that the House passed last week. If signed into law, it would bar members of Congress and their family from purchasing publicly traded stocks. But it will likely die in the Senate; House Republicans attached to the bill a measure to require photo identification for voters—a nonstarter for many Senate Democrats—and some say the bill has loopholes.
While the Stop Insider Trading Act is a small step in the right direction, there needs to be a law that mandates that members of Congress (and the president, while we are at it) put their assets in a trust or in a fund indexed to the entire American stock market or economy. That would align the actions of politicians with the broader interests of the country.
More effective would be to also enact term limits, thereby getting rid of career politicians altogether. Of course, we then run into the age-old problem that the people voting on these reforms are precisely the ones who benefit from the lack of regulation; the people responsible for fair legislation have a dog in the fight.
Congress members have drifted too far from the Founding Fathers’ vision of public service. They must wake up and realize that, at some point soon, regular working-class Americans, the people who actually built our country, aren’t going to put up with this stuff any longer.
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Brian Hamilton is the founder of Abrigo (formerly Sageworks), one of the first financial-technology companies, and the nonprofit Inmates to Entrepreneurs, which helps formerly incarcerated individuals start businesses. He co-hosts ABC’s show “Free Enterprise.”
