The House in a bipartisan vote on Friday reauthorized the nation’s warrantless surveillance powers, approving the program for another two years even as lawmakers narrowly declined to attach an amendment that would require a warrant for some searches.
The chamber cleared the bill — which will extend and reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — in a 273-147 vote.
Congress is staring down an April 19 deadline to reauthorize the spying powers.
Consideration of the FISA legislation made for a dramatic scene on the House floor where, minutes before final passage, the chamber voted down an amendment 212-212 that would have added a warrant requirement for Americans’ data swept up in foreign surveillance. In the House, a tie loses.
That amendment, led by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), had emerged as the central disagreement in the FISA debate, pitting privacy hawks on the Judiciary Committee — who were in favor of the provision — against members of the Intelligence Committee and the White House, who opposed it.
Approval of the amendment would have raised serious questions about the FISA bill’s fate in the Senate and White House.
Passage of the FISA legislation marks a win for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who had struggled for months to facilitate compromise among two warring factions on the controversial topic of reauthorizing the U.S.’s warrantless surveillance authority.
Those disagreements led to a short-term extension in December, caused Johnson to scrap plans to vote on a reform bill in February, and prompted 19 Republicans to tank a procedural vote for a reauthorization measure on Wednesday — hours after former President Trump urged lawmakers to “KILL FISA” in a statement on Truth Social — dealing an embarrassing blow to the Speaker.
After eleventh-hour negotiations between the GOP holdouts and leadership on Thursday Johnson agreed to change the FISA reauthorization from five years to two years, keep a vote on the warrant requirement amendment and hold a vote in the near future on a separate data privacy bill, which was enough to get the hardliners to agree to open the legislation up for debate.
But even with FISA off Johnson’s to-do list, the road ahead is rocky for the Speaker as he looks poised to barrel into a contentious debate over sending additional aid to Ukraine, which has believed his Speakership since he won the gavel in October.
Hanging over that debate, as was the case for FISA, is a threat by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to force a vote on ousting Johnson. The Georgia Republican filed a motion to vacate — the same mechanism used to remove former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — late last month, but has not yet said when she plans to trigger the resolution.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows for the warrantless surveillance of noncitizens located abroad. But the communications they receive from Americans they are also in contact with are swept up in the process.
The issue has united some Republicans and Democrats who argue the government should need a warrant to review any information collected on Americans as a result of foreign surveillance.
“The underlying bill has got some changes and reforms that are positive, that are good, but short of having this warrant amendment added to the legislation, we shouldn’t pass it,” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said during debate Friday. “This amendment is critical.”
But others, aligned with the intelligence community and the White House, argued the move would gut the bill, blinding law enforcement to information they need to act on in real time.
In a statement Thursday night, the White House said it “strongly opposes” the amendment because it, they argued, would “rebuild a wall around, and thus block our access to, already lawfully collected information in the possession of the U.S. Government.”
The failure of the warrant amendment is a blow to privacy hawks who since last year have lobbied to include such a measure in a FISA 702 bill — something that caused many of those champions to withhold support for the overall bill.
Johnson hailed the bill as a reform package that would respond to abuses of the tool, largely from the FBI — a message that was unconvincing to many of his colleagues that have railed against the agency.
The FBI last year was found to have improperly used the FISA database 278,000 times. But the number of queries has dropped dramatically since the agency made shifts to the search portal that opted agents into searching the 702 database, down to 119,000 last year from more than a million the year prior.
The bill includes numerous reforms to FISA 702, including requiring agents to get approval before querying the 702 database for information that may concern Americans. That winnows the number of personnel who can greenlight a search from around 10,000 down to 550.
The bill also requires a Justice Department audit of all U.S. person queries – though such a review would only happen after the fact.
It also includes provisions that would notify some members of Congress about searches involving lawmakers – something critics described as protections “for me but not for thee.”
That provision would also require law enforcement to get congressional blessing to do a “defensive” search of information relating to lawmakers to determine how they are being discussed by foreign intelligence outlets. Both provisions would allow the director or deputy director of the FBI to make an exception.
The bill also includes provisions that deal with a separate portion of the FISA statute that covers domestic surveillance – updates to the law designed to address the FBI’s spying on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
FISA already requires law enforcement to get a warrant to spy on U.S. citizens, but the bill would bar political opposition and media reports from being used as the basis for applying for a warrant – tackling two issues underlying the warrant for Page.
