Last updated 3 months ago. Our resources are updated regularly but please keep in mind that links, programs, policies, and contact information do change.
Congress faces a deadline nine weeks away. What happens if nobody blinks and the authority lapses?
Intelligence officials say the U.S. would lose the single most valuable foreign intelligence collection tool the United States possesses. A lapse would cause a slow degradation over weeks and months, creating blind spots that adversaries would exploit before policymakers even realized how much visibility they’d lost.
How Section 702 Works
Section 702 authorizes the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to compel American telecommunications companies to hand over communications of foreigners located outside the United States. The NSA, FBI, and CIA use this authority. Americans communicate with foreigners constantly, and those conversations get swept up anyway, stored in databases that FBI agents can search without a warrant using American names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
What makes this authority valuable is speed. Getting a traditional warrant requires proving to a judge you have probable cause that someone is committing a crime—a process that can take days or weeks. Targeting under this program can be approved in minutes. An analyst needs to show that surveilling them would produce foreign intelligence. When adversaries operate at digital speed, that flexibility matters.
What Expires on April 19
The moment the authority expires, new surveillance collection stops. The government’s yearly approvals to order companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon to provide access expire. Ongoing operations against existing targets cease. Intelligence agencies would be left with collections in progress but no legal authority to continue them.
Existing data would not be destroyed immediately, but agencies would probably keep searching existing databases for some period without authority to collect anything new.
The primary alternative is Executive Order 12333, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 directive that grants intelligence agencies broad power to conduct foreign operations with minimal congressional oversight and no court involvement. But EO 12333 is slower and more cumbersome. New targets require multi-step approval involving the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense. No blanket directives to companies—instead, a tedious case-by-case process.
The NSA gets hit hardest. Its collection of internet messages passing through the main U.S. telecommunications networks would become unavailable. Programs that track who talks to whom would require complete restructuring. Within weeks, the NSA would lose the speed that makes this program valuable, reverting to procedures that take days instead of minutes to add or remove targets.
The FBI faces different problems. Its primary use of this authority is searching the NSA’s database for communications involving Americans suspected of contact with foreign intelligence targets. Without it, the FBI reverts to warrants—slower, requiring probable cause of criminal activity, and only applicable to criminal investigations rather than foreign intelligence work.
Over weeks and months, operational consequences compound. Intelligence analysts lack current information on targets they’d been monitoring. Foreign adversaries realize U.S. capabilities have degraded and adjust their communications patterns. Counterterrorism investigations lose a key source. The government wouldn’t be able to figure out which foreign countries caused cyberattacks. The government’s knowledge of what foreign adversaries are planning becomes outdated.
A lapse wouldn’t eliminate foreign intelligence collection. The U.S. would retain EO 12333, traditional warrants, signals intelligence agreements with allies, and human intelligence operations. But these alternatives are slower, narrower, and less flexible.
The Warrant Requirement Debate
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is pushing for warrant requirements. If federal agents want to search a database using an American’s personal information, they should need approval from a judge. Libertarian Republicans and progressive Democrats both support his position.
The White House is pushing back. Their argument: warrant requirements would be operationally unworkable. If an FBI agent investigating terrorism has reason to believe a foreign suspect might be contacting an American, the agent should be able to quickly search the database. Requiring a warrant adds days or weeks, creates enormous workload for the FISA Court, and might cause investigators to miss time-sensitive intelligence.
Neither side seems willing to compromise much. Senator Mike Lee says lawmakers shouldn’t reauthorize the program without a warrant requirement.
Shifting Political Alignments
In 2023-2024, Republicans feared abuse by a Biden White House potentially targeting associates of the former president. Now, with a new administration wielding these powers, Democrats worry about how officials might use unfettered authority. Some Democrats now want warrant protections, while some Republicans who previously opposed restrictions might support them out of concern about future Democratic control.
The 2024 amendments also added collection to address “the international production, distribution, or financing of drugs driving overdose deaths.” This lets the government use this authority for drug enforcement, not foreign intelligence alone. If an intelligence agency suspects a foreign actor is involved in drug trafficking, it can conduct operations—and incidentally collect communications with Americans involved in the drug trade. Police could then arrest those Americans.
The Congressional Calendar Constraint
The House will be out of session for three of the next eight weeks. Five weeks remain in session to negotiate a compromise, draft legislation, move it through committee, obtain a rule from the Rules Committee, debate it on the floor, amend it if necessary, and pass it.
Speaker Mike Johnson has an extraordinarily slim majority. Getting legislation passed requires either having the votes lined up from the Republican conference or negotiating with Democrats for support. During those five weeks, lawmakers will also be dealing with budget negotiations and other national security legislation.
The Senate faces fewer calendar constraints, but the program still needs to pass through Senate Judiciary Committee procedures, full Senate debate, and reconciliation with whatever the House passes.
The Privacy Concern
Nobody knows exactly how many American communications get swept up. The NSA and FBI don’t publish estimates of how many American communications are incidentally collected annually. Privacy advocates have been asking the government for this number for years. Agencies say it’s hard to figure out if an email belongs to an American and that attempting to count American communications would itself require intrusive examination of metadata and content.
But the number is substantial. In 2023, the FBI searched databases for American names or phone numbers over 57,000 times—57,000 times that law enforcement searched specifically for communications involving Americans. This doesn’t count all the American communications in databases, which would be far larger.
Civil liberties groups say this is a domestic tool in practice: it collects Americans’ communications and lets the government search them without a warrant. The Brennan Center found examples of the program being used to spy on protesters, journalists, and members of the House and Senate—all Americans who had done nothing wrong and had no connection to foreign intelligence targets.
Officials have signaled aggressive intentions in domestic law enforcement and immigration enforcement. Attorney General Pam Bondi says her office will crack down hard on immigration violations. Democrats worry that the authority could be used to surveil immigrants or activists in ways that serve political agendas rather than national security objectives.
Three Paths Forward
If lawmakers renew the program without changes, it continues as is. Agencies retain full operational capability. Another vote would be required by April 19, 2028. The downside: the government keeps collecting and searching Americans’ communications without warrants. The upside: agencies don’t lose operational capability or face disruption and degradation from a lapse.
A compromise could require the government to get a judge’s approval before searching databases for American communications. If an FBI agent wants to search for an American, the agent would first ask a judge for permission by showing why they suspect that person is involved in a crime. The downsides: investigations slow down, the government has more paperwork, and some searches don’t happen because they’re too much work. The upsides: a judge reviews every search of American communications, protecting people’s privacy rights.
Another compromise could require warrants but allow exceptions—no warrant needed for terrorism or cybersecurity investigations, or in emergencies. This would preserve much of the operational flexibility while providing some constraint on routine law enforcement uses.
Lawmakers might let the authority expire if they can’t agree on a deal. In 2015, a program that collected Americans’ phone records wasn’t renewed. Agencies didn’t cease to exist. They transitioned to other authorities and adjusted operations. But letting this program expire would cause much bigger problems because it’s so widely used. A temporary renewal could keep negotiations going, but expiration would create confusion about what the government is allowed to do, force disruption of ongoing operations, and force the government to quickly figure out how to conduct operations legally under other frameworks.
If a terrorist attack occurred after expiration, whichever party allowed the lapse would face intense blame. If privacy violations emerged after a clean renewal, the party that blocked reforms would face criticism. Both parties understand these risks, which creates pressure to find middle ground—but also makes each side reluctant to be seen as giving in.
Current Status and Timeline
As of mid-February, lawmakers are still negotiating but haven’t agreed on anything. Crawford and Jordan are exploring compromises, and the White House says it will negotiate—though its primary preference remains a clean extension. Privacy groups are pushing for protections. Agencies are warning that they will lose important capabilities.
By late March, if lawmakers haven’t agreed, the pressure will become intense. Speaker Johnson will face pressure to renew the program without changes. House leaders will face pressure to demand warrant protections. Senate leaders will face pressure from both sides.
Eventually, someone will compromise. Lawmakers will renew the authority, let it expire, or pass a temporary extension. Whatever they decide will affect how the U.S. collects foreign intelligence for years. Agencies say the program has stopped terrorist attacks by enabling disruption of specific plots before attacks could occur. Civil liberties advocates say it violates the Fourth Amendment. Both positions have merit. The question is whether lawmakers can find a deal that keeps the government’s tools while protecting Americans’ privacy—or whether the deadline will arrive with no deal, causing expiration even though nobody wants that.
Our articles make government information more accessible. Please consult a qualified professional for financial, legal, or health advice specific to your circumstances.