On May 15, 2025, Rob Bresnahan's stock account went shopping. It bought shares in four oil companies — ConocoPhillips, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum and Valero — plus the heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar, according to his disclosures as compiled by Quiver Quantitative and reported by Heartland Signal.
One week later, on May 22, the Pennsylvania Republican voted yes when the House first passed Trump's budget bill. The bill passed by a single vote, 215–214. On July 3, he voted yes again on the final version.
That bill was good news for exactly the kinds of companies his account had just bought.
What the account bought
Members of Congress only have to report trades in dollar ranges. Here is what Bresnahan's account bought on May 15, 2025:
- ConocoPhillips — $15,001 to $50,000
- Marathon Petroleum — $1,001 to $15,000
- Occidental Petroleum — $1,001 to $15,000
- Valero Energy — $1,001 to $15,000
- Caterpillar — $1,001 to $15,000
Add up the ranges and that's somewhere between about $19,000 and $110,000 in oil and equipment stock, bought one week before the vote.
What the bill did for them
Trump's budget bill "includes many provisions intended to expand onshore oil and gas leasing and drilling on federal lands," including required federal lease sales, lower royalty rates for oil and gas companies, and fewer environmental limits on leasing, according to a Thomson Reuters legal summary quoted by Heartland Signal. ConocoPhillips and Occidental drill for oil and gas. Marathon and Valero refine it.
Caterpillar stood to gain from a different part of the bill: a tax break that lets businesses write off the full cost of heavy equipment in the year it's put into service, instead of spreading the deduction out over several years.
Selling health stocks the same day
The oil purchases didn't happen in isolation. The very same day, May 15, Bresnahan's account sold stock in nine health care companies — including insurers that cover Medicaid patients — as Heartland Signal reported in October.
We've covered that half of the story before: Bresnahan sold Medicaid company stock, then voted to cut Medicaid — nine days after announcing he'd set up a blind trust.
Put the two together and the pattern is hard to miss. In one day, his account got out of companies that would be hurt by the bill's Medicaid cuts and into companies that would gain from its drilling and tax provisions. Then he voted for it.
Bresnahan says a financial advisor makes his trades without his input.
He promised Medicaid was safe
Bresnahan also voted in February 2025 for the House budget plan that set up the bill, which directed at least $880 billion in cuts from programs overseen by the committee that handles Medicaid. Afterward he said that if he were "presented with a bill that is going to gut Medicaid benefits to the people that legally deserve them," he was "ready to cast a resounding no vote."
He voted yes. Twice.
He promised to ban trading, too
Bresnahan ran for Congress promising to ban members from trading stocks. In August 2025 he walked that back and said he'd keep trading, because otherwise he would "lose money and go broke," Heartland Signal reported.
He traded so often in his first year that his own constituents put an insider trading ban on the November 3 ballot in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties.
What the filings show
On May 15, 2025, Rob Bresnahan's account bought between about $19,000 and $110,000 in stock in four oil companies and Caterpillar, and sold stock in nine health care companies. A week later he voted for Trump's budget bill, which expanded drilling on federal land, cut oil and gas royalties, gave businesses a faster tax write-off for heavy equipment, and cut Medicaid — after he had promised to vote no on any bill that gutted Medicaid and had campaigned on banning congressional stock trading.
Source
- Bresnahan's account bought oil stocks before Big Beautiful Bill vote — Heartland Signal, November 1, 2026
