The Committee has contributed significantly over the years to ensuring that members of Congress and their staffs maintain the highest of ethical standards.

Most recently, the President has signed the most important congressional ethics legislation of the past five years, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. The House and Senate overwhelmingly approved slightly different bills, and the Senate agreed to the House version on March 22, 2012. The President signed the bill into law on April 4.

The STOCK Act, S.1871, explicity bars members of Congress and their staffs from profiting in any way from information they obtain as part of their job, which is not publicly available.

In 2007, the Committee helped shepherd lobbying disclosure and ethics reform legislation through the Senate. And as far back as 1996, the then-named Governmental Affairs Committee investigated and held a series of hearings on improper and illegal activities during the 1996 federal elections.  

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