The Nominee Who Kept Trading
On March 5, President Trump nominated Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma to succeed Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. The coverage wrote itself: former plumbing company owner, ten years in the House, three in the Senate, a close Trump ally headed for one of the biggest jobs in the cabinet.
We were more interested in a different paper trail.
We used Barebone to pull every stock trade Mullin has disclosed since joining the Senate and rebuilt his record from the filings: more than 500 trades and over $24 million in combined buying and selling since 2023 - about three disclosed trades every week. And sitting inside that record are three small purchases, made one month before the nomination, that share exactly one trait: federal money.
Here is what we found: which names he bought, what they actually returned through today's close (one is now underwater), where the conflict-of-interest story holds up - and where it turns out to be two years out of date.
$24 Million Through the Turnstile
The yearly rhythm of Mullin's disclosures since he entered the Senate:
| Year |
Bought |
Sold |
| 2023 |
$5.18M |
$0.16M |
| 2024 |
$3.70M |
$5.29M |
| 2025 |
$4.66M |
$3.15M |
| 2026 YTD |
$0.98M |
$0.89M |
Two things stand out. First, the volume is steady - this is a portfolio that gets worked every year, in both directions. Second, the record is not clean: Benzinga reported in March that some of Mullin's 2023 transactions were not disclosed until 2025, roughly two years past the deadline set by the STOCK Act - the 2012 law that requires members of Congress to report securities trades publicly within 45 days. A violation, if a routinely unpunished one.
Most of the portfolio is exactly what you would expect from a wealthy senator's brokerage account: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia and Meta on the tech side; Citigroup, JPMorgan and American Express in financials; Chevron and ConocoPhillips in energy; L3Harris and RTX in defense. Index-adjacent mega caps that say nothing about what their owner knows.
Volume isn't the story, though. Selection is.
Three Names That Don't Belong
On February 4, Mullin bought ten stocks in a single session, each in the $15,001 - $50,000 range (congressional disclosures report bands, not exact amounts). The full list from the filing:
| Stock |
Ticker |
What it does |
| Adobe |
ADBE |
Creative and document software |
| Amkor Technology |
AMKR |
Semiconductor packaging and test |
| APi Group |
APG |
Safety and specialty services |
| Carpenter Technology |
CRS |
Specialty alloys for aerospace and defense |
| Citigroup |
C |
Global bank |
| FirstCash |
FCFS |
Pawn and retail finance |
| McKesson |
MCK |
Drug distribution |
| Monolithic Power |
MPWR |
Power-management chips |
| Stride |
LRN |
Online education |
| VSE Corporation |
VSEC |
Aviation aftermarket parts and repair |
Seven of those names could sit in anyone's account. Three of them - Carpenter Technology, Amkor and VSE - are different. Call them the singular names: small and mid caps that stand far apart from the mega-cap furniture filling the rest of his book, and the three that congressional-trade watchers flagged almost as soon as the disclosure hit the public record.
The shared thread is federal money.
Carpenter Technology makes specialty alloys - high-performance metals for jet engines, fasteners and defense hardware - that flow into contractors like RTX and Lockheed Martin. The Pelosi Tracker flagged the buy the day the disclosure surfaced, pointing at the obvious tension with Mullin's committee seats.
Amkor Technology is the largest U.S.-based OSAT - an outsourced factory that takes finished silicon wafers and packages and tests them into usable chips. In December 2024, the Commerce Department finalized up to $407 million in CHIPS Act funding for Amkor's roughly $2 billion advanced-packaging plant in Peoria, Arizona - an estimated 2,000 manufacturing jobs and a facility aimed squarely at AI chips.
VSE Corporation is an aviation aftermarket company - parts distribution plus maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) for aircraft already in service. The trackers tied it to a $565 million Air Force contract from 2023.
And the man buying all three sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which authorizes what the Pentagon does, and the Senate Appropriations Committee, which decides what actually gets funded.
That is the case for suspicion. Here is what checking it turns up.
Where the Story Holds - and Where It's Stale
Start with the strongest link. Carpenter Technology is a genuine aerospace-and-defense supplier, and an Armed Services member buying it is exactly the pattern the STOCK Act's disclosure regime exists to surface. No correction needed there.
Amkor is messier. The CHIPS award is real and enormous, but it was finalized in December 2024 - fourteen months before Mullin's purchase - and it came from the Commerce Department, not the Pentagon. Armed Services does not oversee it. The appropriations connection runs thinner than it sounds, too: Mullin's six Appropriations subcommittees cover agriculture, interior, labor and health, financial services, the legislative branch and foreign operations. Not defense, and not the commerce panel that funds the CHIPS program office. Full-committee members do vote on all twelve annual spending bills, so he is in the room. But "he writes the checks" overstates it.
VSE is where the narrative breaks. The military framing - aviation maintenance for the U.S. armed forces - is roughly two years out of date. VSE sold its Federal & Defense segment in February 2024, then divested its Fleet unit in April 2025 for up to $230 million, completing a deliberate transformation into a pure-play commercial aviation aftermarket company - roughly $1.2 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, with a third quarter that grew 38.9% year over year. The $565 million Air Force deal the trackers cite predates all of that. Today's VSE rises and falls with global air traffic and engine shop visits, not the defense budget.
So the scorecard on "three defense plays from the man who funds defense" reads: one clean hit, one partial, one stale. That is what verification does to a tidy narrative.
It also leaves the more interesting question standing. Conflict or not - were the trades any good?
Five Weeks Later, the Tape Answered
We measured all three from the February 4 close to today's close, March 10.
| Stock |
Feb 4 close |
Mar 10 close |
Return since buy |
| Carpenter Technology (CRS) |
$334.19 |
$377.21 |
+12.9% |
| VSE Corporation (VSEC) |
$193.61 |
$199.88 |
+3.2% |
| Amkor Technology (AMKR) |
$43.87 |
$41.27 |
-5.9% |
One strong winner, one modest gain, one loss. But the path matters more than the snapshot - because as recently as yesterday, the scoreboard looked completely different.
At Monday's close, March 9, all three names were green: Carpenter up +22.1% since the buy, VSE up +11.2%, and Amkor up - barely - +0.1%. Then today happened. Carpenter fell -7.6%, VSE -7.2% and Amkor -6.0%, all in a single session.
| Stock |
Since buy, Mar 9 close |
Move on Mar 10 |
Since buy, Mar 10 close |
| CRS |
+22.1% |
-7.6% |
+12.9% |
| VSEC |
+11.2% |
-7.2% |
+3.2% |
| AMKR |
+0.1% |
-6.0% |
-5.9% |
"Everything he buys goes up" was a true statement for about one trading day.
There is a crueler detail for anyone hoping to trade off his filings. The February 4 purchases did not reach the public record until early March - and the trackers that flagged Carpenter noted it had already gained roughly 22% by the time the disclosure published. From that flag to tonight's close, the post-disclosure copier is down high single digits. Mullin's own entry is still up double digits.
The disclosure lag is not a bug in copy-trading Congress. It is the defining feature: by law, you learn what a senator bought up to 45 days after he bought it - and in this case, the move had already happened.
The Uncomfortable Math of Copying Congress
Hold the Mullin file up against the full population and the pattern sharpens. Unusual Whales - the data outfit whose annual reports drive most congressional-trading headlines - tallied 2025 results across 311 disclosed congressional portfolios in its January report. Roughly 100 of them, about 32%, beat the S&P 500 last year.
The averages are even less romantic. Republican members averaged +17.3% in 2025 and Democrats +14.4%, against +16.6% for the S&P 500. In aggregate, the most suspiciously well-positioned investor class in America performed almost exactly like an index fund - a hair better on one side of the aisle, two points worse on the other.
The tails are where the legend lives. Representative Warren Davidson posted +78.8% in 2025, Donald Norcross +70.8%, Terri Sewell +67.9%, Bryan Steil +62.5%. Numbers like those - like Mullin's +22.1% on Carpenter as of Monday's close - make headlines, get clipped into videos and pull retail money into copy-trading products. The two hundred-odd portfolios that trailed a plain index fund do not.
Beyond cherry-picking, there are three structural reasons to distrust the signal:
- You trade the echo. The 45-day window means the information is stale on arrival. Carpenter's entire 22% move happened before the disclosure went public.
- You don't know the size or the reason. Disclosures report bands - $15,001 - $50,000 here - not conviction. A $30,000 flyer is noise inside a portfolio worth tens of millions, and filings don't say who pulled the trigger; many members say outside advisers run their accounts.
- The hit rate is unremarkable. When roughly two-thirds of congressional portfolios trail the index in a year, "Congress trades on secret knowledge" has to coexist with "Congress mostly underperforms a target-date fund."
None of this proves the trades are innocent. It proves something more useful: even if some members do trade with an edge, the public copy of that edge - lagged, unsized, unexplained - has been a poor substitute for the real thing.
What This Means
Treat a congressional disclosure the way an analyst treats any unusual-buyer signal: as a flag for further research, never as the research itself. The Mullin file is a working example - one trade that survives scrutiny (Carpenter), one that needs heavy qualification (Amkor), and one whose premise dissolved on contact with the company's own filings (VSE).
Three things worth watching from here:
The confirmation process. Mullin is a nominee, not a secretary. Cabinet officials, unlike senators, typically sign ethics agreements that force divestitures of conflicting holdings - if he is confirmed, this portfolio may end up being wound down by lawyers, and those final dispositions will themselves be disclosable events.
Whether the singular names work without the seat. If positions like Carpenter were informed by the committee room, the edge should fade once he leaves it. That is a rare, almost laboratory-grade test of how much congressional alpha is real - and the public filings will let anyone run it.
The gap between his entry and yours. The lasting lesson of the Carpenter trade is not the conflict; it is the decay curve. His +22.1% at Monday's close was a copier's high-single-digit loss by tonight's.
Congressional trading sits in an odd place: too suspicious to ignore, too noisy to follow. The filings are public, the lag is law, and the averages say the magic mostly isn't there. The question is not whether a senator's portfolio can tell you something. It is whether what survives the journey to you - 45 days late, sized as a band, explained by no one - is still worth anything by the time it arrives.
Data: Barebone | Sources: Senate periodic transaction reports, U.S. Department of Commerce CHIPS award announcement (December 2024), VSE Corporation investor releases, Office of Senator Markwayne Mullin (committee assignments), Unusual Whales 2025 Congress Trading Report | Data as of March 10, 2026
