The Riches of Wisconsin’s Congressional Delegation

Cash. (CC0 Creative Commons).

A job with the U.S. Congress seems like a very good way to become wealthy.

Consider the eight House members and two U.S. senators in Wisconsin. Five of the 10 members are millionaires and four have seen their wealth grow significantly since they took office. All are Republicans. That’s according to required financial disclosures filed by all 10 members, which were analyzed by the news site NOTUS. They are only required to publicly disclose the value of their assets and liabilities in broad ranges, so the analysis used the median value of these figures to estimate each politician’s net worth.

No one has done better than Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, whose median wealth rose nearly three times higher, growing from $24 million to $64.9 million since he was first elected in 2011.

Still, other Wisconsin Republicans who served a much shorter time in Congress have seen their wealth balloon:

– Rep. Scott Fitzgerald‘s net worth rose from $3.5 million to $6.3 million in 2024, just three years after taking office in 2021.

– Rep. Glenn Grothman‘s net worth jumped from $885,000 to $2.2 million in 2024, 10 years after he first took office in 2014.

– Rep. Bryan Steil‘s net worth hit $1.9 million in 2024, up from $812,000 when he was first elected in 2018.

Another Republican, Rep. Tony Wied, has a net worth of $10.1 million and just entered Congress in 2024. Should he see the same kind of growth in income, he could probably double that in a decade.

These millionaires are a clear contrast to the voters they represent: the average Wisconsinite has a median net worth of about $76,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

As for Wisconsin’s five other members of Congress, none are millionaires, most have seen no growth in income and two have a negative net worth. The representatives and change in their fortunes as of 2024:

– Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan‘s net worth grew from $541,000 when he was first elected in 2012 to $778,000.

– Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin‘s net worth declined from $623,000 when she was first elected to the Senate to $588,000.

– Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany‘s net worth rose from $230,000 when he was first elected in 2020 to $296,000.

– Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore had a net worth of -$75,000.

– Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden had a net worth of -$88,000.

Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year.

The analysis by NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, noted that most of Pocan’s net worth comes from Budget Signs & Specialties, a printing company he fully owns. Much of Fitzgerald’s wealth comes from real estate investments. Steil’s increase in wealth has come largely from stock and bond funds.

Driven by the wealth of Sen. Johnson, the average net worth of Wisconsin’s 10 members of Congress is about $8.4 million. That’s higher than the national average for members of Congress.

As of 2020, over half of the members of Congress were millionaires and the median net worth of members was approximately $1 million, as Open Secrets reported. That has likely gone up since then: a recent analysis by Quiver Quantitative suggests that the median member of the 535-person Congress, ranked number 268th in wealth, has a net worth of about $1.7 million.

The upper chamber is much wealthier, where the average U.S. senator has a median net worth of nearly $4.4 million, as another NOTUS story reported. It’s a club where 73 of the 100 members are now worth more than $1 million, the story found.

“The Senate is packed with multimillionaires, and the fact is some of them have lost touch with the real-world challenges faced by Americans all over the country,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, told the publication. “It is part of the reason that we have a tax system that favors people who make money off of money and penalizes those who earn a paycheck through hard work.”

Members of Congress often enter the House or Senate with a high net worth. But they typically become much richer while serving. Over a typical nine-year career, an average member of Congress will have about 25% more wealth than the average U.S. resident who started the nine-year period in the same wealth cohort as the representative, a study published in the Harvard Law Journal found.

A member of Congress makes connections that may lead to opportunities to grow richer. A classic example is insider trading. A New York Times investigation found that from 2019 to 2021, 18% of members of Congress traded stocks in sectors related to the work of the congressional committees they sat on.

In January, Rep. Steil introduced the Stop Insider Trading Act, which would prohibit members of Congress, spouses and dependent children from purchasing publicly traded stocks. It is not the first such legislation to address the issue, and seems likely to fail, as past bills have.

Johnson provides a classic example of someone using his position to become wealthier. He pushed to make sure President Trump‘s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act added a tax break for pass-through companies (businesses that pass income on to their owners and are not subject to corporate income tax). Johnson admitted that he benefitted personally from this tax break.

Johnson was also a beneficiary of Wisconsin Republicans’ passage of the Manufacturing and Agriculture Tax Credit, which allowed him to evade the payment of any state income taxes, saving him and his wife the $400,000 to $920,000 in annual taxes they had previously paid, as Urban Milwaukee reported.

And Johnson benefited financially from a family-connected company’s cozy deal with China, including a $50 million loan from the Bank of China, during a time he was pushing for softer relations with Beijing. It was a rare example of the senator disagreeing with Trump administration policies.

Yes, the senator’s job in Congress has helped make him far more wealthy.