Warrantless Spying Reform Just Got a Whole Lot More Interesting
For many years, Congress has maintained a bipartisan consensus on warrantless surveillance. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has allowed the U.S. government to surveil foreign nationals abroad since its passage in 2008, and as the Prospect has reported time and time again, domestic intelligence agencies have amassed troves of communications data, including from American citizens, through the program. The National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI do not need a warrant to access this data, regardless of whether it comes from a foreign national or U.S. citizen.
Section 702, which must be reauthorized by Congress periodically, is set to expire on April 20. The House is expected to vote on it in the coming weeks.
Historically, lawmakers’ attempts to meaningfully reform the program have failed. The last time lawmakers squabbled over extending FISA in April 2024, the most far-reaching amendment would have required U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant before spying on American citizens. That vote ended in a rare 212-212 tie on the House floor, meaning it did not pass.
In their testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last week, all the nation’s top intelligence officials regurgitated many of the same talking points their predecessors have used to convince Congress that Section 702 is a must-pass necessity. Echoing the sentiment of deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, they urged lawmakers to extend the program without reforms, emphasizing how President Trump’s war with Iran makes the need for foreign intelligence ever more urgent.
Whenever the time has come to reauthorize Section 702, bipartisanship seems to cut both ways. On the one hand, reformers in both parties try to remedy the virtually limitless collection of information from American citizens with guardrails designed to allay privacy concerns. On the other hand, intelligence hawks in both parties seek to scare their colleagues to vote in favor of the status quo and strike down any reforms to Section 702.
Whenever the time has come to reauthorize Section 702, bipartisanship seems to cut both ways.
But this time around, that dynamic could be disrupted. President Trump made it clear weeks ago that he will not sign any legislation that comes across his desk until Congress passes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a Jim Crow–coded disenfranchisement bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote in federal elections. Some of Trump’s biggest MAGA allies are following through on Trump’s wishes, even as the White House has argued in favor of a clean FISA bill. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) has announced plans to try to attach the SAVE Act to the FISA reauthorization. “The Senate has failed the American people and will not under any circumstances pass the Save America Act, which is why we will have to stick that on FISA,” Luna tweeted earlier this month.
If Luna is successful, extending Section 702 would become a poison pill for Democrats, who say they will not extend the program if it ends up being tied to SAVE. “Any bill that is connected to the SAVE Act, including a FISA extension, is guaranteed to fail,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a leader of FISA reform efforts, told the Prospect. “The SAVE Act amounts to a Republican voter suppression bill, designed to disenfranchise millions of voters, including married women and the 50 percent of Americans without a valid passport. It is a total nonstarter for Democrats in any form.”
Combining the two measures would have far more damning implications as well. Voting against extending FISA, which again is widely regarded as a must-pass, could force Democrats to concede that it is not.
It would be difficult for Luna to link the SAVE Act to any FISA reauthorization, as the House Republican leadership knows they can’t pass the legislation in that form. But if Luna’s bid fails, a not-so-trivial number of House Republicans have said they would vote against a clean FISA extension, or indeed any legislation that comes up for a floor vote. In addition to Reps. Brandon Gill (R-TX) and Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), three other House Republicans are “prepared to vote no on any Senate legislation until the upper chamber stops dragging its feet and passes the SAVE America Act,” Reps. Randy Fine (R-FL), Keith Self (R-TX), and Mark Harris (R-NC) wrote in an op-ed for Fox News this month.
Luna has said that “there are enough votes in the House to kill FISA unless the SAVE America Act is attached to it.” Indeed, many Republicans already reject a Section 702 extension without reforms, and adding in the SAVE Act threat increases that number. So there may not be a majority of House votes for a clean bill without SAVE, just as there would not be a majority of House votes with it. That could create a real impasse as the clock ticks on the Section 702 expiration.
The office of Rep. Luna did not respond to a request for comment.
IT REMAINS UNCLEAR WHETHER INTELLIGENCE HAWKS on the other side of the aisle will be able to compensate for any loss of votes as a result of the presence or absence of SAVE. Still, as was evidenced by the last FISA extension fight, they can be expected to try.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) has served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence since 2013. He was appointed as the committee’s ranking member in 2023, and subsequently reappointed in 2025. With a little help from Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), who served as committee chair the last time lawmakers squabbled over a FISA extension, Himes rammed through an amendment that made it even easier for intelligence agencies to collect communications data from noncitizens traveling to the U.S.
To the ire of civil liberties advocates, Himes and Turner also helped advance a measure expanding the definition of “electronic communication service provider,” or ECSP, to include cloud services, messaging apps, and other nontraditional telecommunications. (Latinos living in the U.S. often turn to messaging platforms like WhatsApp to contact friends and family abroad.)
The sense of urgency fabricated by the intelligence community on extending FISA has displaced privacy concerns on more than one occasion. In the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, Himes backed the USA Freedom Act, an amendment to the PATRIOT Act that prohibited the NSA from collecting domestic phone records and metadata in bulk. He lauded the legislation for striking a “balance between privacy and national security,” but stopped short of supporting reforms designed to restrict the nation’s sweeping surveillance authority. During the last FISA fight, Himes also led the charge by intelligence hawks in the House to extend Section 702 without reforming the program.
The office of Rep. Himes did not respond to a request for comment.
“Why does Donald Trump have a bunch of dangerous surveillance powers? Once again, Jim Himes,” Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, said in an interview with the Prospect.
Demand Progress has been fighting to defend civil liberties for more than a decade. It is one of 133 civil rights, labor, and privacy groups urging Congress to enact meaningful reforms to FISA before reauthorizing the program.
For Vitka, FISA reform has always presented a “real opportunity for principled bipartisanship that stands at odds with both centrism and traditional left-right dynamics,” describing it as analogous to bipartisanship on releasing the Epstein files. “That is also the same political nexus that cares about your fundamental rights,” he said, “and so even where we disagree with some of the relevant Republicans here on other issues, it is not an easy thing to stand up to this administration.”
Much of the coalition has thrown its weight behind Wyden and a bipartisan slate of lawmakers in their push to pass an updated version of the Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA), which prioritizes key provisions that reformers, both inside and outside the halls of Congress, have long sought: closing loopholes the federal government exploits to access or purchase communications data without a warrant, forcing American citizens and companies to spy on its behalf, and prohibiting reverse targeting, among other reforms.
“No Democrat should vote to give Trump a blank check for warrantless surveillance,” Wyden said. “Passing FISA 702 without strong new guardrails, while doing nothing to stop the government from buying Americans’ location data and feeding it through AI systems to conduct unprecedented mass surveillance, would be almost criminal negligence.”
Despite these efforts, Luna and her tribe might end up derailing this reform effort over SAVE. Yet if there’s a silver lining for reformers, throwing the SAVE grenade into the FISA fight could make a clean extension impossible. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) already appears to be caught between a rock and a hard place—with GOP hard-liners on one side and pro-reform Republicans on the other.
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