U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s investments helped make him millionaire, nearly doubling his net worth from $812,000 to nearly $1.9 million since he went to Congress, Wisconsin Watch reports. According to the financial data tracking platform Unusual Whales, Steil’s stock portfolio was the fourth most profitable among members of Congress in 2025, outperforming the S&P 500 by 62.5%. Yet Steil is running as a watchdog on congressional stock trading. 

“You deserve a Congress you can trust, that’s working for you. … I’m leading the charge to ban members of Congress from trading stocks,” Steil says in a campaign ad now running in Wisconsin’s suddenly competitive 1st Congressional District.

The ad refers to Steil’s Stop Insider Trading Act, which failed in the Senate this week. Steil blamed Democrats for blocking his attempt at “ethics reform” and vowed to keep fighting.  But Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin called the bill a “sham,” pointing out that there are much stronger bills that, unlike Steil’s, require members to divest their stock holdings.

Steil’s bill allows members of Congress to keep and sell stocks. It places no restrictions on their purchases of cryptocurrency holdings, betting in prediction markets or trades in industry-specific mutual funds or private stock offerings from corporations. 

These giant loopholes drew the attention of Steil’s colleague U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, who grilled Steil on the shortcomings in his bill during a House Rules Committee hearing on July 20. 

“There are many bills that have been introduced … that would ensure that the sale and the purchase of stocks is banned, and this bill does not do that,” Neguse pointed out. He and Steil debated whether a disclosure rule in Steil’s bill is a sufficient safeguard (Neguse didn’t think so), and why the bill didn’t cover prediction markets. 

The Senate unanimously passed a ban on members and staff participating in prediction markets, just one week after a U.S. special forces soldier was charged with using classified information to bet on the capture of the Venezuelan president. Members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information they could use for personal gain by placing bets on wars, economic crises or elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned. Why can’t the House pass the same ban, Neguse asked. Steil replied that he has been working on a separate bill concerning prediction markets, which are a “new and novel technology.” 

“It took the Senate a day!” Neguse shot back. “It’s a one-page resolution. It literally is a paragraph. It just says members of the Senate are banned from participating in prediction markets.” Neguse suggested that the House adopt the Senate’s language and pass the same resolution immediately. 

Instead, Steil has crafted a narrow bill that imposes fines on members and their families if they bet on specific government policy matters that come to their attention through their congressional work. Like his narrow stock-trading bill, which avoids making members give up lucrative investments, the Stop Lawmakers from Predicting Act takes a permissive view of members interested in playing in prediction markets unless there is a specific, demonstrable conflict of interest that a member’s colleagues on the House ethics panel deem worthy of a fine.

At best, that’s a different goal than the “Congress you can trust” Steil talks about in his campaign ad. Instead of protecting the public from corrupt public officials who seek to profit from their privileged perch, Steil is intent on not making things too uncomfortable for his fellow members sitting on cushy portfolios.

It says a lot that Steil’s prediction market bill and his Stop Insider Trading Act both have the full support of President Donald Trump. As Baldwin points out, Trump is exempt from Steil’s proposed restrictions on stock trading, even though Trump made 21,000 stock trades and added $2.2 billion to his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term.

This is the real hole in Steil’s claim to be an ethics watchdog in Congress. His compromised reform proposals don’t come close to making up for the heavy lifting he has been doing in office carrying water for Trump. He has been a chief enabler for a president who is setting new records for unethical behavior as he uses his office to enrich himself. Along with his weak efforts at “ethics reform,” Steil has been pushing new voting restrictions dear to Trump’s heart. His proposed national Voter ID Act is even more restrictive than Wisconsin’s toughest-in-the-nation voter ID law, barring the use of student IDs to vote and potentially disenfranchising millions of eligible voters who don’t meet the requirements. 

Steil does not present as a rage-filled MAGA warrior. Like his mentor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, he has repeatedly won reelection by comfortable margins while projecting a friendly, thoughtful image in his home district, even as his work in Washington diverges from his constituents’ interests. But as crises pile up, it’s getting harder to put a pleasant gloss on loyalty to an administration that is rapaciously devouring the nation’s wealth while trying to disenfranchise its citizens. 

Wisconsin’s 1st CD has attracted national attention recently as the political landscape gets tougher for Republicans even in solidly red House districts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Steil’s reelection race to its Red to Blue list and an internal DCCC poll conducted Sept. 21-23 — with a margin of error of 4.4% — found the race is a dead heat between Steil and his challenger, former VA hospital nurse Mitchell Berman, with the two candidates tied 48-48 among likely voters, a plurality of whom identified as Republicans.

A new Berman campaign ad, paid for in part by the DCCC, which now sees Steil as a target, emphasizes Steil’s stock portfolio. In it, Berman declares, “Public service shouldn’t be about getting rich.” Steil couldn’t have said it better himself.

The prediction market platform Novig is suing to stop the state Department of Justice from using the state’s gambling laws to prevent the firm from operating in Wisconsin. 

Novig’s federal lawsuit follows DOJ’s lawsuits in April that charged three other prediction market platforms with violating Wisconsin’s recently adopted online sports gambling law. 

In the new lawsuit, filed by Novig’s parent firm Ludlow Exchange LLC, the business asserts that it isn’t engaged in “gambling” but instead is “providing sports-based event contracts to customers across the United States.”

Event contracts pay out to customers who purchase a contract for a specific outcome, such as victory by a particular team in a particular game. In the lawsuit Ludlow Exchange asserts that an event contract is a “derivative” investment regulated exclusively by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“The field here is not gambling,” the lawsuit states. “It is the regulation of trading on federally designated contract markets — the discrete activity over which Congress conferred exclusive jurisdiction” to the CFTC. 

DOJ communications director Riley Vetterkind referred a request for comment on the lawsuit to the department’s April 23 press release that announced its lawsuits against three other prediction market firms. 

“Thinly disguising unlawful conduct doesn’t make it lawful,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said then. “These companies’ alleged facilitation of sports betting in Wisconsin should be shut down.”

Novig entered the Wisconsin market the first week of August. Ludlow Exchange and Novig said in their lawsuit, which was first reported by WisPolitics, that they were filing the complaint because DOJ “could bring an enforcement action premised on the false notion that Novig is violating state gambling laws, exposing Novig to criminal liability for a Class I felony.”

The emergence of prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket has prompted states across the country to enact legislation and file lawsuits, Stateline reported in March.

The online platforms have been estimated to generate more than $13 billion every month, with the bulk of those revenues coming from sports betting, Stateline reported.

DOJ sued Kalshi, Coinbase, Polymarket and other prediction platforms in April, charging that their engagement in online sports betting violated the state’s online sports gambling law signed earlier that month. 

The new law legalized online sports betting in Wisconsin on the condition that the computer servers required are housed on tribal land. Until the law’s enactment, sports betting had been legal in Wisconsin since 2021, but only in person at tribal casinos.

The DOJ’s lawsuits said transactions on the prediction market platforms are “indistinguishable from an ordinary sports bet” as defined in Wisconsin law.

Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase and the other defendants in Wisconsin’s lawsuits have also asserted that they’re beyond the reach of state gambling bans. They contend they’re only subject to federal regulation by the CFTC, and that a federal appeals court has ruled states don’t have jurisdiction over prediction markets.

The defendants have moved Wisconsin’s cases into federal court, where lawyers are currently arguing over whether they should remain there or return to Dane County’s court.