Two years ago, President Donald Trump told Congress to “KILL FISA.” On Wednesday, he asked them to keep it alive for another 18 months, no changes needed.
The president posted on Truth Social, urging lawmakers to pass a clean extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the provision that lets US spy agencies intercept the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant but has many times been used, directly or indirectly, to gather data on Americans.
It means no new privacy protections. No warrant requirement for searching Americans’ data. No closing of the loopholes that let intelligence agencies buy your browsing history from data brokers instead of getting a judge’s approval.
Trump framed the ask around the ongoing military operations in Iran. “With the ongoing successful Military activities against the Terrorist Iranian Regime, it is more important than ever that we remain vigilant, PROTECT our Homeland, Troops, and Diplomats stationed abroad, and maintain our ability to quickly stop bad actors seeking to cause harm to our People and our Country,” he wrote.
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“The fact is, whether you like FISA or not, it is extremely important to our Military,” he added. “I have spoken to many Generals about this, and they consider it vital.”
The details of what Section 702 actually does tend to get buried under urgency. The provision nominally targets foreigners overseas, but the collection process vacuums up American communications too, every time a US citizen emails, texts, or calls someone abroad.
Those intercepted messages sit in classified databases. FBI agents can then search that data using Americans’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses, all without a warrant.
The FBI ran those warrantless searches more than 278,000 times in a single year, according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The agency’s own inspector general found searches targeting peaceful protesters, sitting lawmakers, congressional staff, thousands of campaign donors, journalists, and at least one judge.
The 2024 reauthorization bill, known as RISAA, introduced some changes to search procedures. It did not add a warrant requirement. A House amendment that would have required one failed in a 212-212 tie, the thinnest possible margin. Speaker Mike Johnson broke that tie against the warrant.
Now Johnson is back, pushing the same approach. He told reporters Wednesday that the US does not “have the abuses that we had before,” and that “FISA as currently constituted, as we amended with 56 major reforms, is working as desired, and we do not have the abuses we did before.”
The claim that 56 reforms solved the problem deserves scrutiny. Those reforms limited the number of agents who can search the database and required supervisor approval before reviewing information on Americans. They did not require judicial oversight. A supervisor’s sign-off is not a warrant. An internal checklist is not the Fourth Amendment.
Trump’s pivot on FISA has pulled some notable Republicans with him. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who voted against reauthorization in 2024 specifically because the warrant amendment failed, reversed last week.
He now supports the extension, calling it “a whole different context today.” The context he means is the Iran conflict, not any change to how the surveillance system treats Americans’ data.
President Trump himself acknowledged his own history as a surveillance target, noting that his 2016 campaign was spied on using a different FISA authority. He said his administration has “worked tirelessly to ensure these reforms are being aggressively executed at every level.”
He had called for the extension to preserve the “Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA,” writing: “When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe. For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension, HOWEVER, the Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA must remain intact to protect the American People from abuses. Nobody understands this better than me.”
The bill still faces resistance. Section 702 expires April 20, and Johnson was forced to delay the expected vote to mid-April after hard-line Republicans refused to fall in line. Rep. Keith Self has called the warrantless surveillance of US citizens a fundamental privacy issue. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has pledged to oppose the legislation unless Congress attaches the SAVE America Act, a voter ID bill, creating a separate legislative standoff within the surveillance fight.
Rep. Lauren Boebert put it most simply. While there were 56 reforms last year, she wants to see 57. “I want warrants,” she said Wednesday.
That demand, a warrant before the government searches Americans’ private communications, came one vote from passing in 2024. Three reform bills currently sit before Congress: the SAFE Act, PLEWSA, and GSRA. Each would add a warrant requirement for queries involving Americans’ data. The clean extension ignores all three.
The pattern repeats every time Section 702 comes up for renewal. Intelligence officials warn that any reform will create dangerous gaps. Lawmakers who promised to fight for warrants find reasons to wait. The deadline pressure makes “just extend it” sound reasonable. And the warrant requirement, the single reform that would bring this surveillance program in line with the Fourth Amendment’s basic protections against unreasonable search, gets pushed to the next cycle.
Congress built the two-year sunset into Section 702 specifically, so lawmakers would have regular opportunities to add meaningful protections.
Instead, those deadlines have become opportunities to extend mass surveillance with fewer questions asked each time.
