The House passed the Community Bank Deposit Access Act of 2025 on May 20 by a vote of 393 to 16, one of those blowout margins that makes a bill look boring and bipartisan right up until you check who holds what. Three sitting members of Congress carry Goldman Sachs in their disclosed portfolios. The bill touches the Capital Markets sector directly. Two of those three members voted yes. The public filings are timestamped. The roll call is public. That's the setup.
What the Bill Does
HR.5317 is formally the Community Bank Deposit Access Act of 2025. The name is designed to make you think of small-town savings banks and local loan officers. The affected sector, per the bill's own classification, is Financial Services, with Capital Markets as the specific industry callout. Goldman Sachs is a Capital Markets firm. The Goldman Sachs Group is not a community bank. The bill passed 393-16 anyway, which tells you roughly how much resistance the financial services lobby ran into on this one.
A 393-16 margin in the current House is the legislative equivalent of a standing ovation. Sixteen members voted no. The other 393 decided this was worth a yea, including at least two members with direct Goldman exposure in their portfolios.
The Three Names
Start with Josh Gottheimer. New Jersey Democrat. Voted yea. Per his disclosure filings, he holds Goldman Sachs stock. The House just moved a Capital Markets bill. Gottheimer cast a vote in favor of it while that position sat on his books.
Maria Elvira Salazar, Republican from Florida, also holds Goldman Sachs per her disclosures. Also voted yea. One member from each party, both Goldman holders, both voting to pass a bill affecting Goldman's sector. The bill carries a market relevance score of 95 out of 100 on our internal model — reflecting how directly the bill's provisions map onto the affected industry. A 95 means the sector overlap is the point, not an incidental brush.
Then there's Dave McCormick. Pennsylvania Republican. Also a Goldman holder per his filings. McCormick did not vote. His position on HR.5317 is recorded as absent — not in the yea column, not in the nay column. For the purposes of this vote, he sat it out.
Three Goldman holders. Two yeas. One absence. The roll call doesn't explain the absence. It just records it.
The Sector Overlap
Members of Congress are required to disclose their stock holdings within 45 days of a transaction under the STOCK Act. They are not required to divest, recuse, or abstain before voting on legislation affecting those holdings. The system runs on disclosure, full stop. The assumption baked into the law is that transparency is sufficient to police conflicts.
Goldman Sachs is not a marginal player in Capital Markets. Per the Blind Trust GS tracker, Goldman sits in the disclosed portfolios of multiple sitting members of Congress, with these three representing the holders with the most direct vote-overlap on this specific bill. The Goldman Sachs Group carried a market cap north of 80 billion as of the vote date. Bills that affect the Capital Markets sector affect Goldman's operating environment. It's the company's primary business line.
The Community Bank Deposit Access Act sounds narrow. Capital Markets legislation rarely is. Provisions that adjust deposit access, liquidity frameworks, or interbank competition touch the same regulatory territory where firms like Goldman operate. When a bill scores a 95 on sector relevance for Capital Markets and three Goldman holders are in the chamber voting on it, the question writes itself.
The Vote Math
393-16 is the kind of margin that signals one of two things: the bill is genuinely uncontroversial, or the opposition doesn't have the muscle to mount a real fight. Sixteen nay votes in a 435-member chamber is 3.7 percent of the body. The bill sailed.
The sixteen members who voted no didn't leave a public statement on the roll call. What's in the data is the lopsided result and the list of who was on which side, including the members whose brokerage accounts had a stake in the sector. They were in the 393. Whether their Goldman holdings shaped their calculus, or whether a 393-16 vote just means the bill had no serious opposition and the holdings are incidental, the roll call doesn't say. It just records the vote.
What the Disclosures Show and What They Don't
Disclosure filings name the security and the approximate value range. They don't timestamp the decision to buy. They don't explain why the member holds the position. They don't indicate whether the member follows Goldman earnings calls or whether Goldman stock came bundled in a mutual fund their financial advisor picked in 2019. The law treats all of those the same: disclosed, therefore handled.
What the filings do establish, plainly: on the date the House voted on legislation directly affecting the Capital Markets sector, three members who hold Goldman Sachs stock were in the chamber. Two voted. One didn't. The filings have a column for the ticker symbol and a column for the value range. Both columns are filled in.
McCormick's absence is its own data point. Absent members sometimes have scheduling conflicts, travel issues, or health reasons. The record shows an absence on a 393-16 vote where he held the sector's flagship stock. Public filings don't come with footnotes.
The Institutional Logic
Congress passed the STOCK Act in 2012 after years of documented trading around legislation. The law created the disclosure requirement. It didn't create any mechanism to prevent members from holding and voting simultaneously. The assumption was that public visibility of holdings would let the public draw its own conclusions.
The public is currently drawing conclusions about three members who hold Goldman Sachs and just voted on a bill rated 95 out of 100 for Capital Markets relevance. The system is working exactly as designed. Whether the design is adequate is the question the system politely declines to answer on your behalf.
The Pattern
Vote-holding overlaps in the Financial Services sector are not anomalies. They're a recurring feature of how the institution operates — a Financial Services-heavy donor class, personal financial disclosure as the ceiling rather than the floor of accountability, and a bill calendar that moves sector-adjacent legislation continuously. Three Goldman holders. One Capital Markets vote. Two yeas and an absence on a Tuesday in May.
The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.