Ashley Moody Wasn’t Elected. She Was Installed. And Her First Acts as Senator Were to Trade $2.2 Million in Stock While She Had Access to Information Only Congress Has.
Ashley Moody was not elected to the United States Senate. She was appointed.
When Marco Rubio resigned his Florida Senate seat to become Secretary of State, Ron DeSantis reached for the woman who had served as Florida’s attorney general under his administration and installed her in the seat without a single Florida voter casting a ballot for her. She was sworn in on January 21, 2025. She is now asking Floridians to keep her there for a full term.
There is a case to be made that Florida voters should evaluate her record since her appointment. Let us make that case.
The Trading
Senator Ashley Moody has gained 310% in the past year using her portfolio. For context: the S&P 500 gained approximately 10% over that same period. The new Nancy Pelosi is a Republican senator from Florida who was appointed rather than elected, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, and who traded more than $2.2 million in stock across 57 transactions while holding a seat that gives her access to information the public does not have.
A CNN analysis found that senators’ stock trades directly overlapped with their committee work. Among the senators who listed themselves as owners of stock in industries that their committees regulate are Republicans Bill Hagerty, John Kennedy, Ashley Moody, Jerry Moran, Bernie Moreno, Markwayne Mullin and Tommy Tuberville.
Moody sits on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She traded healthcare stocks. She sits on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She traded defense and industrial stocks including Howmet Aerospace. Her 57 trades include positions in Super Micro Computer, Applied Materials, NVIDIA, and Howmet Aerospace. These are companies that do significant federal contracting and are directly affected by the legislation and oversight her committees conduct.
The defense Moody’s office offered: when she was appointed to the Senate at the end of January 2025, she was a part of an extended family investment partnership where a partner independently made investment decisions in consultation with a third-party financial advisor, and with no input from the Senator.
This is the standard congressional disclaimer. A financial advisor did it. The senator didn’t know. The senator didn’t direct the trades. The trades happen to have generated a 310% return in a year when the market was up 10%. The senator serves on committees that regulate the industries in which the trades were made. But the financial advisor did it independently.
“It’s all extremely troubling,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s a bipartisan problem. Republicans and Democrats are guilty of this, pretty evenly across the board. There’s an institutional rot at the core of this.”
The Legislation That Followed
Here is where the story gets richer. Faced with scrutiny over the trading, Moody’s office says the senator “immediately” took steps to withdraw from the partnership and has not traded stocks since April 2025. “As a sign of this commitment, Senator Moody introduced legislation to restore trust in Congress and ensure there is no appearance of impropriety as it relates to members trading individual stocks,” the statement reads.
She stopped trading stocks and then introduced a bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Republican Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida introduced legislation that would bar lawmakers and their immediate family members from trading or owning individual stocks.
“The American people must be able to trust that their elected officials are focused on results for the American people and not focused on profiting from their positions,” Moody wrote.
This is, simultaneously, the right position and a stunning example of someone who profited from exactly the practice she now wants to ban. She made a 310% return trading stocks while serving on committees that regulate those industries. She got caught in a CNN analysis. She stopped trading. She introduced a bill to stop other people from doing what she had just finished doing. And she wrote about the importance of public trust.
The bill, notably, would exempt the president and vice president, a carveout likely to draw criticism from some Democrats. The president who has made $2.2 billion trading crypto and running a meme coin scheme from the Oval Office is exempted from the stock trading ban Moody introduced. That is the legislation of a woman who understands which alliances she needs to maintain.
Big Pharma’s Senator
A number of pharmaceutical companies had their drugs removed from a list slated for price reduction negotiations with Medicare officials, thanks to legislation that Moody supported. Big Pharma threw its support behind Ashley Moody’s Senate campaign in return.
This is the transaction that defines the Moody model. Pharmaceutical companies spend money on lobbying to remove their drugs from Medicare price negotiation lists. Senators vote for the legislation that accomplishes this. The pharmaceutical companies then donate to those senators’ campaigns. The senators describe this as principled opposition to government interference in the free market. The drug prices do not come down. The donations continue.
Moody voted against extending Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies in December 2025. The people who lost those subsidies are not the people donating to her campaign.
Who She Was Before
Before her Senate appointment, Moody served six years as Florida’s attorney general. During that time she supported lawsuits to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. She opposed the legalization of recreational cannabis. She opposed the restoration of voting rights for former felons. After the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative passed in 2018, she and Governor Ron DeSantis helped push a bill through the Florida Senate that would restore voting rights to eligible felons only once the felons had paid all their court fees.
In 2020, after Michael Bloomberg raised $16 million to pay 32,000 felons’ court fees, which would make them eligible to vote in the 2020 elections, Moody asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Bloomberg, claiming he potentially violated election laws.
A man paid court fees so that people who had served their sentences could vote. The Florida attorney general asked the FBI to investigate him for it. The people who had served their time remained unable to vote.
After Joe Biden won the election and Trump refused to concede, Moody took a leading role in aiding Trump’s attempts to contest the election.
She joined the lawsuit to overturn the results of a presidential election she did not like. She investigated a man who helped poor people pay their court fees so they could vote. She was then handed a United States Senate seat without an election. The woman who helped try to cancel an election was given a seat in the Senate without one.
The Opponent
Moody faces Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — the decorated combat veteran who testified about the Ukraine phone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment, who was subsequently forced out of the National Security Council, who moved his family to Florida and decided to run for the Senate seat he is now within striking distance of winning. A statistically even race, with Vindman’s optimistic internal polling highlighting his strength and Moody’s weaknesses.
Vindman said: “I am a 21-year combat veteran who has reported corruption at the highest level. Politicians have already thrown their worst at me, which is why Ashley Moody and her allies don’t faze me. I am focused on delivering for my community, which means lowering costs and fighting corruption.”
A recent poll found that 95% of Florida voters say “Political corruption and unchecked money in politics is leading to higher costs.”
Ashley Moody made a 310% return on stock trades while serving on the committees that regulate those industries. Big Pharma donated to her campaign after she voted to protect their drug prices from Medicare negotiation. She was appointed to her seat by a governor whose administration she served. She is now running for a full term asking Florida voters to elect a senator who was never elected to anything statewide.
The 95% of Florida voters who say political corruption is leading to higher costs have a candidate in November. His name is Alexander Vindman. He already knows what it costs to tell the truth to people who don’t want to hear it.
He did it anyway.