Public Biography
Sloane Merrick is a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas, where she has represented a district in the Houston suburbs since 2021. She co-chairs the Congressional Federation Caucus with Curtis Vandermolen, Democrat of Michigan, and is the lead Republican voice in support of the United Federation of Planets Designation Act, the measure that would rename the United States of America the United Federation of Planets.
Ms. Merrick was born in Sugar Land, Texas, in 1979 and holds a degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University and an M.B.A. from Rice University. Before entering politics she spent eleven years as a systems engineer in the commercial spaceflight sector, an experience she cites frequently and describes as “the only industry in America still in the business of going somewhere.” She sits on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the latter of which has complicated her sponsorship of the Designation Act by claiming partial jurisdiction over it.
Ms. Merrick frames the renaming not as a matter of good governance, as her Democratic co-chair does, but in the language of ambition and national destiny. “Other countries name themselves for the land they sit on,” she said at the bill’s introduction. “We should name ourselves for where we are going.” She has rejected the suggestion that the name overstates the nation’s reach as “a failure of nerve dressed up as a fact-check.”
She lives in Houston and in Washington, and is known among colleagues for a composed, exacting personal manner and a distinctive, severe sense of style.