Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) has repeatedly called for members of Congress to be barred from trading individual stocks, but a series of financial disclosure filings from her 2022 campaign and first years in office show changes and omissions involving Robinhood, Amazon, Tesla, and Apple stock that raise questions about whether or not all of her assets and any required transactions were properly reported.
In a January 2025 video promoting legislation to prohibit members of Congress from trading stocks, Perez said, “We’re not here to get rich. I also think it’s really important that members of Congress and their spouses are not trading individual stocks. It doesn’t make sense to me that we’re currently able to do that. I don’t do it.”
Perez similarly said that “serving in Congress should be an opportunity to deliver for your community, not to enrich yourself,” while supporting a stock-trading ban that she said would help ensure lawmakers “will be held accountable to their constituents and be in the work of governing for the right reasons.”
In another post, Perez wrote that serving in Congress should be about “public service, not lining your pockets,” adding that lawmakers should not be able to “enrich themselves through stock trading.”
Perez has also criticized members of Congress who failed to comply with existing disclosure requirements. A press release from her office stated that the STOCK Act requires public disclosure of trades within 45 days and said that 78 members of Congress had violated the law during the 117th Congress.
Perez’s stock disclosure history begins with a June 15, 2022, candidate financial disclosure report. Perez reported owning between $1,001 and $15,000 in Robinhood Markets stock and reported between $1,001 and $2,500 in capital gains and dividends from the investment during the preceding year.
Perez filed an amended candidate financial disclosure report on February 21, 2023, after winning election to Congress. That filing listed Amazon and Tesla holdings valued between $1,001 and $15,000 each. The Amazon and Tesla holdings had not appeared on her original June 2022 candidate disclosure.
The amended filing, however, no longer listed the Robinhood stock holding that Perez had disclosed in June 2022. The records cited here do not establish if or when Perez sold the Robinhood shares, although her earlier disclosure of capital gains from the investment indicates the stock may have been sold.
The February 2023 amendment also listed capital gains and dividends associated with Tesla, while no capital gains, dividends, or other income were listed for the Amazon position.
Perez then filed a new-filer report as a member of Congress on May 15, 2023. That report disclosed capital gains of between $201 and $1,000 from Apple stock during 2022, but Apple had not appeared as an asset on either her original June 2022 candidate report or her February 2023 amended candidate report. The value of the underlying Apple position is not identified in the records cited here.
The House Ethics Committee’s 2025 financial disclosure instruction guide states that candidates generally must disclose investment assets exceeding $1,000 at the end of the reporting period or assets that produced more than $200 in unearned income. The guide also describes a candidate reporting period as generally extending from January 1 of the preceding calendar year through a date within 30 days before filing.
Those standards raise questions about the Amazon and Tesla holdings, which were absent from Perez’s original 2022 candidate disclosure before appearing on her February 2023 amendment, as well as the Apple holding, which was absent from both of those candidate filings before capital gains from Apple appeared on her May 2023 new-filer report.
The Robinhood holding presents a different question because it appeared on the original disclosure before disappearing from the February 2023 amendment.
The Amazon stock presents an additional issue because Perez’s February 2023 amended report disclosed a position worth between $1,001 and $15,000, while her subsequent annual member financial disclosures for 2023 and 2024 did not list Amazon stock.
The records also do not identify a periodic transaction report, or PTR, showing a sale of the Amazon shares. House Ethics guidance states that reportable purchases or sales exceeding $1,000 generally must be disclosed on a PTR, including transactions that result in a net loss. The guide says such reports must generally be filed by the earlier of 30 days after the filer becomes aware of the transaction or 45 days after the transaction itself.
That leaves two possibilities that cannot be resolved from the filings cited here: Perez could have sold the Amazon stock, in which case the timing and size of the transaction would determine whether a PTR was required, or she could have continued holding it, which would raise a question about why the position did not appear on later annual financial disclosure reports.
The 2023 annual financial disclosure Perez filed on May 13, 2024, did not list Amazon stock, and her 2024 annual disclosure filed in May 2025 likewise did not list an Amazon position. Unlike the Tesla and Robinhood holdings, the cited Amazon disclosure does not show capital gains or other income that would indicate when the shares were sold.
Perez’s position on congressional trading has continued since those filings. Her legislation with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-IA) sought to ban congressional stock trading, halt automatic congressional pay raises, and strengthen restrictions on lawmakers becoming lobbyists after leaving office. More recently, Perez has promoted her vote to restrict congressional stock trading while saying she hopes Congress continues efforts to “clean up corruption in Congress.”
The disclosure questions come after other reporting scrutinized Perez’s financial and business practices. In 2023, Breitbart News reported that Perez and her husband were more than six months late paying roughly $6,600 in 2022 property taxes on their auto-repair-shop property in Portland, Oregon. Perez said at the time that she and her husband had been occupied with their family business, infant child, and congressional campaign, and said the bill had been paid during the tax year.
Oregon Live, according to Breitbart’s report, had initially been told by the county that the bill remained unpaid. The outlet reported that Perez’s office was contacted at 11:41 a.m. and that the outstanding tax and interest were paid at 12:43 p.m. The National Republican Congressional Committee subsequently delivered a copy of Small Business Taxes for Dummies to her office.
Perez had also written during the period that she paid more in taxes than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, while calling for a tax system that required wealthy Americans to pay more. The Washington Free Beacon reported that she may have been referring to her tax rate rather than the total amount of taxes paid.
Seattle Red, citing reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, also scrutinized Perez’s description of herself as a Southwest Washington small-business owner even though Dean’s Car Care, the auto-repair shop she co-owns with her husband, is located in Portland, Oregon. The reporting also described differences between Washington and Oregon employment rules, characterized the shop as nonunion, and cited Oregon workplace-safety violations from 2017 that resulted in $120 in fines.
An archived version of the business’s website reportedly described Perez as working largely behind the scenes on tasks such as spreadsheets. Her 2024 disclosure showed approximately $28,000 in compensation as company secretary.
