McKinley Lewis: Staff director, Senate Special Committee on Aging; deputy chief of staff for strategic initiatives, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)

McKinley Lewis is a long-serving aide and trusted adviser to Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has become an influential conservative voice in the Senate Republican Conference.

Scott has made a national name for himself as an advocate for election reform and tackling the nation’s $40 trillion debt. Yet he remains intensely focused on the needs of his Florida constituents and that’s where Lewis plays a major role.

Florida is home to more than 4.5 million people over the age of 65, and Scott is in a good place to address their concerns as chair of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, which Lewis manages as staff director.

Scott and Lewis have turned a sleepy committee into a workhorse, holding 35 hearings during the 119th Congress.

Scott has called in a wide array of witnesses, including businessman Kevin O’Leary, former NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and mogul Mark Cuban. His panel has produced five major policy reports and is working to change regulations for generic drugs with the Clear Labels Act.

Lewis, 34, is one of the youngest committee staff directors in the Senate thanks to a meteoric rise. He joined the Florida senator’s staff as deputy communications director in 2016 during Scott’s second term as Florida governor.

He faced a crisis just few weeks later when a 29-year-old gunman shot and killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Lewis was the staff member closest to Orlando at the time of the tragedy and immediately rented a car to drive there at the crack of dawn.

He and Scott spent the next week holed up in a mobile command unit for more than 12 hours each day, handling the state’s response to what at the time was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

Lewis rose to senior staff level in 2018 but had a tricky decision to make after Scott was elected to the upper chamber later that year. Lewis’s wife, an Air Force medical officer, was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base on the Florida panhandle, so he opted to stay with his family in the Sunshine State for the next two years.

In November of 2020, however, Lewis’s mother-in-law stepped up in a big way by agreeing to move to Fort Walton Beach to help raise his two young daughters. That freed him to commute to Washington, D.C., for several days a week to take his “dream job” serving as Scott’s top communications adviser.