Anna Paulina Luna asks Donald Trump to move NASA headquarters to Florida

Space shuttle Atlantis is seen as it launches from pad 39A on Friday, July 8, 2011, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The launch of Atlantis, STS-135, is the final flight of the shuttle program, a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Pinellas County Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has written a letter urging President Donald Trump to consider moving NASA’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Florida’s Space Coast.

Luna argues the move would offer “significant strategic, economic, and logistical advantages to NASA and the United States.”

The Representative, an ally of the president who sat in his V.I.P. box during parts of the Republican National Convention last Summer, writes that the Space Coast is not only home to government facilities such as the Kennedy Space Center, but now also houses private space industry companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing.

“Additionally, the presence of the U.S. Space Force in Florida presents a unique opportunity for NASA to collaborate more closely with military space operations,” she writes.

“Such proximity would enhance coordination on key projects like satellite technology, national space initiatives, and advanced space exploration missions. By co-locating NASA with the Space Force, the two agencies could share resources, streamline operations, and increase efficiency in both military and civilian space programs.”

Luna’s proposal follows a similar call by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this month when making an appearance at the Kennedy Space Center.

“There is an interest in moving the headquarters of NASA to right here to Kennedy Space Center, and I’m supportive of that,” he said.

“They have this massive building in Washington, D.C., and like nobody goes to it, so why not just shutter it and move everybody down here. I think they’re planning on spending like half-a-billion to build a new building up in D.C. that nobody will ever go to either, so hopefully with the new administration coming in they’ll see a great opportunity to just headquarter NASA here on the Space Coast of Florida. I think that’d be very, very fitting.”

While campaigning for president, DeSantis promoted the idea of moving some federal agencies outside of the nation’s capital.

The existing NASA headquarters lease expires in August 2028, and the agency already has evaluated multiple options including leasing or purchasing within the District of Columbia, according to the agency’s website.

President Trump called for moving as many as 100,000 government jobs to “new locations outside the Washington swamp” during the campaign. During his first term in office, he shifted the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, in August 2020. A total of 176 employees working in the BLM headquarters were told to move; 135 declined, with many leaving the agency to take positions elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, according to the Government Accountability Office.

In 2021, the Biden administration announced that it was moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters back to Washington.

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Mitch Perry reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.