Members of Congress vote on the laws that move markets. They sit in classified briefings. They write the bills that decide which industries get money and which get regulated. That's why the law says they have to tell the public what stocks they buy and sell, and do it within 45 days.
Austin Scott has been very good at the buying and selling part.
In February 2022, Benzinga ranked the ten best-performing trading members of Congress for the previous year, using data from Unusual Whales. The list, in order of performance, started with Austin Scott of Georgia. Brian Mast was second. Nancy Pelosi — the Speaker of the House, whose trades got national coverage all year — came in sixth.
The write-up was blunt about why:
"Austin Scott had the two best trades of 2021 according to the data. Scott sold shares of FuelCell Energy for gains of 780% and 571% in two separate orders during the year."
Not the two best trades among Republicans. The two best trades in Congress.
The reporting part has gone worse
The STOCK Act gives members 45 days to disclose a trade. It is not a hard rule to follow. It is a filing deadline.
Between May 2024 and June 2025, Scott did not report 17 of his wife's stock sales until well past that window. NOTUS reported the late filings in August 2025, as part of a story about how many members of Congress were blaming their brokers for missed deadlines.
Scott's explanation: the sales came out of his wife's inherited retirement account, and he "disclosed within 48 hours of the time that I was made aware of them." He told NOTUS he contacted the House Ethics Committee himself and had not been fined.
Here's the problem with the "I didn't know" defense. The House Ethics Committee has already answered it, in writing:
"You are personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information contained in your [financial reports], regardless of who assisted."
It happened before
This is the part that makes the explanation harder to accept.
In October 2021, Business Insider found that Scott was a week late reporting his wife's sale of up to $165,000 in AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway, Ford, and Johnson & Johnson stock (archived copy).
So the same household, the same kind of trades, the same missed deadline — four years apart. A one-time brokerage screwup is a screwup. A pattern is a system that isn't working, and the person responsible for fixing it is the member of Congress.
The penalty is a rounding error
Here's what happens to a member of Congress who files late. A report turned in more than 30 days past its due date is subject to a $200 late filing fee — and the ethics committees can waive even that.
Two hundred dollars, against trades that in Scott's best year returned 780%.
That is the entire enforcement mechanism. Which is why the same names keep coming back around. Roger Marshall hid his family's pandemic-era trades for 17 months and then asked for credit for wanting to ban congressional stock trading. Susan Collins helped write the STOCK Act and then broke it. Byron Donalds demanded "sanctions" for lawmakers who trade and then broke the same law 108 times.
To his credit, Scott told NOTUS he'd be open to stricter rules, including disclosing the actual number of shares and the actual price. That is a real improvement over the members who just blamed their brokers and moved on. It's also not a bill, and it's not a vote, and it hasn't happened.
Why this matters in the 8th District
Scott is Vice Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management, and Credit, and he sits on Armed Services. Those are two of the committees where a member learns things before the public does — about commodity programs, about crop insurance, about defense contracts.
That is precisely the situation the disclosure deadline exists for. It isn't there to embarrass anybody. It's there so that when a member of Congress with that kind of access trades a stock, voters can see it while the information still means something.
Meanwhile, the people Scott represents have been trying to get his attention about their own finances. In March 2025, close to 200 constituents came to his Warner Robins office during a recess and found it empty — so they asked their questions to a blue blazer on a folding chair, including a disabled veteran from Fitzgerald who wanted to know why billionaires needed a $4.5 trillion tax cut while her health care was at risk.
She couldn't get an answer in 45 days either. We deserve better.
Source
"Lawmakers' New Botched Stock Disclosure Scapegoat: Financial Advisers," Dave Levinthal, NOTUS, August 19, 2025, and "10 Best Stock Traders In Congress In 2021," Benzinga, February 2022.
