# Plain Language Summary: TRUST in Congress Act

This bill requires members of Congress and their immediate families to put most of their investments into blind trusts. A blind trust is a special arrangement where an independent trustee manages your investments without telling you what they're buying or selling. The goal is to prevent Congress members from making investment decisions based on insider information they learn through their job, or from voting on laws that would benefit their personal stock portfolios.

Here's how it would work in practice: If you're elected to Congress, you'd have 90 days to move your stocks, bonds, commodities, and similar investments into a blind trust. Your spouse and dependent children would do the same with their investments. Once the money is in the trust, you wouldn't know what's being bought or sold—you'd just receive the returns. The bill includes some exceptions, like allowing your spouse or kids to keep investments they depend on for their main job income, and it doesn't apply to Treasury bonds or widely-held mutual funds. If you leave Congress, you'd have to keep the money locked in the trust for another 180 days before you could access it again.

The accountability piece requires Congress members to certify within 15 days that they've set up the trust, and these certifications would be posted publicly on the House and Senate websites. This transparency is meant to show voters that their representatives aren't using their position to get rich from stock trading. The bill essentially treats Congress members like federal judges and other government officials who already have similar blind trust requirements, based on the idea that voters deserve to know their representatives aren't voting based on personal financial gain.

TRUST in Congress Act

Spanberger, Abigail Davis

Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust in Congress Act or the TRUST in Congress Act This bill requires a Member of Congress, as well as any spouse or dependent child of a Member, to place specified investments into a qualified blind trust (i.e., an arrangement in which certain financial holdings are placed in someone else's control to avoid a possible conflict of interest) until 180 days after the end of their tenure as a Member of Congress.