CLEARWATER — Pinellas County Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s push for a congressional stock trading ban received an endorsement Tuesday from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Saying members from both major parties have unfairly boosted their personal financial fortunes based on information they learn while serving in Congress, the governor added that every member of the state’s 28-member congressional delegation should support the legislation when it comes to a vote in the House later this year.
And he said he will advocate for a state law to require all candidates running for federal office in Florida to check a form about whether they intend to trade individual stocks while serving.
“It’s really odd,” he said while speaking at a press conference held at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station in Clearwater.
“You’ll have people get elected to Congress having never shown any investment acumen ever in their life, and then all of a sudden they become Warren Buffet on steroids. They’re putting some of the biggest hedge funds in America to shame with these stock trades that have these really suspicious timings. Because, look, if you buy a stock and it goes up 400% in like a month? That’s like a once in a lifetime investment, and yet these guys seem to be doing this quite frequently. And they have access to certain information I believe that is helping to fuel that.”
Public opinion polls have shown for several years that banning stock-trading in individual companies by members of Congress is popular.
Portfolios increase
Republicans from across the country have made former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the symbol of how members of Congress have become exponentially wealthier during their time in Washington. Over the past three years, Pelosi reported a trade volume of more than $50 million, according to Capital Trades, a website that monitors the stock activity of members of Congress.
However, according to the government watchdog group Common Cause, that only put the California Democrat eighth among the members of the 119th Congress in terms of trade volume (Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal was first).
Both DeSantis and Luna referred to Pelosi Tuesday but acknowledged that members from both political parties are at fault.
“On average, members that do engage in stock trading on both sides are getting 600% returns now outperforming the S&P,” Luna said. “So, how could you ever expect members of Congress to truly work for the American people if this is indeed what they’re doing? And it’s wrong and it needs to stop and so I’m very happy that Gov. DeSantis has been able to lead on this effort.”
“If you look at Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio, she has absolutely shattered a lot of these investment records,” DeSantis said. “But it’s not just that. There’s a whole bunch and it’s on both sides of the aisle.”
Members of Congress are allowed to buy and sell individual stocks, as long as they don’t violate insider trading rules, under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act).
The public perception that members of Congress are disproportionately benefitting from their positions has been growing in recent years. Members of Congress who later ascend to leadership positions outperformed rank-and-file members by 47 percentage points, according to a November 2025 paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
State legislation to address the issue
DeSantis said he believes so strongly about the issue that he is supporting state legislation to require candidates in Florida who qualify for federal races to fill out a form declaring whether they intend to trade individual stocks while serving. If those candidates run for re-election, he added, they will need to fill out a form asking them whetehr they traded any stocks while serving.
“If they say ‘yes,’ then that means they broke their word to do and, honestly, lied on those forms. That’s what we’re going to do,” he said.
DeSantis served in Congress for six years (2012-2018) and said that he stopped buying and selling stocks when he went to Washington because he didn’t want to be questioned about his integrity.
“My reason was, why would I want to be in a situation where, like, I take some action and then someday someone will say, ‘Well, that’s because you own Microsoft or you own this or that,’” he said.
DeSantis is national co-chair of a bipartisan campaign with the group U.S. Term Limits to enact congressional term limits via a constitutional amendment. And he travelled to Idaho earlier this year to promote a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance its budget.
Rep. Luna has been battling with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to force a vote on the issue. Last month, she introduced a discharge petition to move the proposal directly to the House floor, similar to the tactic used by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to force a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein files. The Pinellas Republican said Tuesday that she has received word that the bill will get a vote.
“I’m happy to report, governor, that we actually have met with the Speaker of the House and that we are going to be putting something on the floor coming up this quarter that will permanently stop insider trading ,which it is happening in Washington D.C., but it’s permanently going to stop it in D.C., so happy to report back on that,” she said.
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This article appears in Jan. 01 – 07, 2026.