Senate

Rick Scott calls for ‘commonsense’ reforms to FISA

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by Max Rego - 04/19/26 2:53 PM ET

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by Max Rego - 04/19/26 2:53 PM ET

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Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) on Sunday called for “commonsense” reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), as debate over the law has split the GOP on Capitol Hill.

Scott told host Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday” that Congress has to “make changes” to Section 702, which allows the federal government to spy on foreigners located abroad.

Early Friday morning, the House unanimously passed a 10-day extension of the country’s warrantless spying powers, after a number of conservative lawmakers rejected a last-minute deal to extend the program for 18 months. The Senate followed suit later that day, with President Trump signing the extension into law on Saturday.

Trump previously called on Congress to pass a “clean” 18-month reauthorization of the program without reforms. Now, the program will expire on April 30.

The Florida Republican added that Congress “instituted 56 substantive reforms” to FISA in 2024, the last time the law was up for reauthorization. But the Brennan Center for Justice criticized those reforms at the time as a continuation of the “unacceptable status quo” that allows the government to “abuse” the law to spy on Americans.

In addition to those reforms, the intelligence community began requiring officers to opt in to searching the Section 702 database, ending a default selection to query it.

Queries of Americans fell from more than 2.9 million from December 2020 to November 2021 to just more than 9,000 in the year after FISA was renewed, according to the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Of those 9,000-plus searches, 127 were noncompliant with the FBI’s querying procedures.

“By every measure and review, those are working just as we planned,” Scott said Sunday. “We’ve not had the abuses that were happening before those reforms.”

Scott, however, noted that the federal government surveilled his company, Columbia/HCA, as part of an investigation into Medicare fraud that led to his resignation in 1997 and the company paying $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines.

He also referenced the FBI obtaining his phone records as part of its “Operation Arctic Frost” probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.

“So, if they can target a large company CEO and a U.S. senator, they can target Americans,” he said. “So, we have to have some commonsense changes.”

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