Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has renewed his push to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after two earlier House votes failed. The bill released Thursday is largely unchanged from an earlier proposal that was defeated in a series of overnight votes this month.
Section 702, which expires April 30, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect electronic communications of foreign nationals located abroad. Because many of the roughly 350,000 foreign targets communicate with Americans, calls, texts and emails involving U.S. persons can be incidentally collected and become available for federal review.
For nearly two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers in both parties have sought a court-approval requirement before federal law enforcement conducts targeted searches of Americans’ data obtained under the program. The absence of such a warrant mandate was a key factor in the collapse of last week’s attempts to pass an 18-month extension and a separate five-year renewal.
Administration officials maintain, as past administrations have argued, that imposing a warrant requirement would hinder law enforcement and imperil national security. Johnson’s new bill would reauthorize Section 702 for three years but does not add a judicial warrant requirement. Instead, it would require the FBI to provide monthly explanations to an oversight official about reviews of Americans’ information, create criminal penalties for willful abuse and make other adjustments intended to increase accountability.
Former President Donald Trump urged retaining the program on Truth Social, saying he would “risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” and asserting that military contacts told him Section 702 is necessary to protect troops overseas and people at home and has prevented many attacks.
Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency, described Johnson’s changes as gestures toward compromise: “There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” he said, calling the package a reasonable compromise for national security agencies while offering some reassurance to privacy advocates.
Privacy groups disagree. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote on X that the bill is “a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal remained elusive. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told NPR that lawmakers were working toward a bipartisan solution and that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., had been in contact with Johnson. Himes said he and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., were negotiating an alternative intended to preserve and reform the program so it could win bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of that inclusive approach. NPR obtained a memo from Raskin urging colleagues to oppose the measure, saying it “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.” Raskin noted that, under the bill, FBI agents could still collect, search and review Americans’ communications without judicial review.
Current FBI rules require annual FISA training and generally bar searches aimed at ordinary criminal investigations; those searches require supervisor or attorney approval. Even so, some conservative Republicans who opposed the earlier effort are not fully on board with Johnson’s plan. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a former Freedom Caucus chair, posted on X that “we’re not there yet,” saying the intelligence community must be held accountable if it spies on Americans.
The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet Monday morning, the first procedural step toward sending Johnson’s renewal bill to the floor for a vote.