Dave McCormick wants to make it easier to build pipelines, solar farms, and nuclear plants. He's been very publicly making that case this week, pitching a permitting reform bill that would speed federal approvals for natural gas, solar, and nuclear projects. Meanwhile, the disclosure filings show he spent the better part of three weeks in late February and early March buying Goldman Sachs stock — five purchases totaling somewhere between $500,000 and $1.25 million depending on where each trade lands in its disclosed range. Goldman Sachs is not a pipeline company. Goldman Sachs is, however, one of the largest financiers of the energy infrastructure that permitting reform would unlock. The Venn diagram is one circle.
The Trade Log
Five purchases. All Goldman Sachs. All in the $100K–$250K range. Spread across 16 days.
The dates, per McCormick's public disclosure record:
- February 23, 2026
- February 24, 2026
- February 25, 2026
- March 3, 2026
- March 10, 2026
Three trades in three consecutive days to open the run. Then two more the following weeks. Methodical. Patient. Committed.
Whatever he was thinking, he thought it five times.
What Goldman Has to Do With Any of This
Goldman Sachs isn't some passive bystander to energy policy. The bank has spent years building out its infrastructure financing and clean-energy lending businesses. When permitting gets faster, projects sitting in regulatory purgatory become bankable. When projects become bankable, Goldman's infrastructure desks get busy and Goldman earns fees.
McCormick is pushing permitting reform as a Pennsylvania jobs story, a kitchen-table energy-costs story, a national-security story. Those are all real framings. They also happen to be framings that benefit the financial institutions that write the checks when shovels hit ground.
Members are required to disclose. They are not required to divest, recuse, abstain, blush, or look up from their phones.
The Fetterman Sidebar
McCormick also turned up in the news this week for a different reason. A report surfaced about whether McCormick encouraged John Fetterman to switch parties, which McCormick denied. Fetterman, separately, said he's not switching. The episode generated 48 hours of cable oxygen and settled nothing.
McCormick also made time for a meeting with the Homer City Redevelopment project in Pittsburgh — constituent work that generates a local radio mention and doesn't move markets.
The Goldman trades, though. Those are the interesting part.
The Math, Such As It Is
Five trades at the floor of the disclosed range adds up to $500,000. Five at the ceiling adds up to $1.25 million. The real number lives somewhere in that band. Congressional disclosure ranges are famously wide — a feature of the system, not a bug.
Goldman Sachs stock rose roughly 12% between late January and mid-March 2026, outpacing the broader market during a stretch when infrastructure and financial stocks caught a bid on anticipation of deregulatory tailwinds. Whether McCormick's purchases rode that move or predated it, the public record doesn't say. The dates say what the dates say.
What the public record does show is a senator averaging one Goldman purchase every three days over a stretch when he was actively working energy-infrastructure legislation. Goldman underwrites the deals that energy-infrastructure legislation enables. The rest is arithmetic.
The Institutional Deadpan Moment
Pennsylvania voters sent McCormick to the Senate in 2024. He beat Fetterman by about three points in a race that cost north of $100 million combined. He sits on committees. He works the legislative calendar. He also, apparently, shops Goldman Sachs on what looks like a regular schedule.
Half the Senate has a portfolio that would make a compliance officer at an actual bank sweat through their blazer. McCormick is in the news this week specifically because of legislation that touches the sector his bank stock is most exposed to.
It's legal. That's the part that should bother you.
The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.