Chairman Rick Scott Sounds the Alarm on Foreign Control of America’s Drug Supply Chain in Aging Committee Hearing

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Rick Scott, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, warned of the risks foreign adversaries pose to America's drug supply chain during a committee hearing titled, "Behind the Label: Foreign Ownership and Control in America's Drug Supply Chain."

Specifically, this hearing exposed how overseas control of America's drug supply chain threatens seniors through invasive access to clinical data and laid out next steps to ensure the federal government is equipped to protect older Americans from foreign threats. This comes after Senator Scott's Older Americans Act reauthorization passed the U.S. Senate yesterday.

Chairman Rick Scott's witnesses for the hearing included:

• The Honorable Nazak Nikakhtar, Partner & Chair of the National Security Practice, Wiley Rein LLP, Washington, D.C.

• Stephen Ezell, Vice President for Global Innovation Policy, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Washington, D.C.

• Edward You, Founder & Principal Consultant, EHY Consulting LLC, Fairfax Station, Va.

Chairman Rick Scott also today introduced the Pharmaceutical Investment Oversight and Accountability Act alongside Ranking Member Kirsten Gillibrand and committee member Senator Elizabeth Warren. This legislation builds off of the hearing by requiring the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), to analyze foreign control and influence over U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing and sensitive biomedical technologies and report their findings to Congress.

Click HERE for Chairman Scott's opening remarks or read as prepared below.

"Here's a question most people have never thought to ask: do you know who actually makes your medicine?

Not what's on the bottle, but who owns the facility.

Who controls the ingredients? Does a foreign government have any influence over the decision of what goes into them?

Most Americans don't know, and in many cases, neither does the federal government.

Seniors rely on prescription drugs more than any other age group.

More than 88% of older Americans report being prescribed at least one medication in the past year. Nearly all of those prescriptions are filled with generic drugs. And a huge share of those generic drugs are manufactured in facilities overseas, by companies with complex ownership structures that FDA, CFIUS, and other agencies often can't fully trace.

For most products, that's a trade question. For medicine, it's a matter of life and death. We've seen what happens when something goes wrong with a faulty supply chain - people die.

We've seen what happens when our supply chain gets constrained - people die. I've said it before but there is no reason why we should be letting our adversary, Communist China, control our medicine supply chain.

If they wanted to, they could restrict exports tomorrow of the critical ingredients needed for live-saving medicines.

The difference between a trade disruption and a public health emergency is how dependent we are on the country doing the restriction. Right now, we are very dependent.

Today we're going to examine a different but related problem: not just where drugs are made, but who owns the companies making them. Foreign ownership and control can create leverage over our drug supply that is largely invisible to the federal government today.

There hasn't been a federal agency that's been designed to understand this. FDA doesn't have full visibility into it. And current disclosure rules don't require the transparency needed to even know where the risks are.

And it goes even further than that. Most people think about foreign threats to our drug supply in terms of what's on the shelf. But there's another problem that almost nobody is talking about.

When American patients participate in a clinical trial, American regulators authorize that trial. American patients take on the risk.

But the data those trials produce, what works, what doesn't, what the next generation of treatments should look like, can end up flowing directly to a foreign government. Legally. With no federal agency able to stop it.

That means Communist China doesn't have to steal our medical breakthroughs. We hand them over.

We have witnesses today who have worked on these problems from inside the government, including at CFIUS and the FBI. They're going to help us put this on the record.

Today I'm announcing the Pharmaceutical Investment Oversight and Accountability Act with Senator Warren and Ranking Member Gillibrand, legislation to require the FTC and CFIUS to report to Congress annually on foreign investment in pharmaceutical manufacturing and related technologies.

Transparency is the first step. But it is just the first step. This hearing is going to help us identify what has to come after it.

The American people, and especially seniors, deserve to know who actually controls the medicines keeping them alive."

BACKGROUND:

Chairman Rick Scott has been the leading Senate advocate for sounding the alarm on foreign interference in America's drug supply chain. In January 2026, Chairman Rick Scott and Ranking Member Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Consumer Labeling for Enhanced API Reporting and Legitimate Accountability for Base Entity Listings (CLEAR LABELS) Act to address these concerns by adding country of origin labeling requirements to the U.S.'s prescription drug supply chain.

In October 2025, Chairman Rick Scott and Ranking Member Kirsten Gillibrand released an investigative report titled "Protecting Seniors' Access to Essential Medications: Securing the Foreign Generic Pharmaceutical Supply Chain." The report focused on America's dangerous overreliance on foreign-made generic drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients, which are largely imported from Communist China. Chairman Rick Scott has been a leading advocate for American drug supply chain transparency and reform.

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