On June 12, 2026, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed for the first time since Congress created it eighteen years ago. The cause was not a principled civil liberties breakthrough. It was a personnel standoff over President Trump's decision to appoint Bill Pulte — a former Federal Housing Finance Agency director with no national security background — as acting Director of National Intelligence, bypassing Senate confirmation for up to 210 days.
The House voted 198 to 218 on June 11 to reject a short-term extension, falling short of the two-thirds supermajority required under suspension of the rules. Nineteen Republicans crossed the aisle to vote against; only seven Democrats crossed in the opposite direction. It was the final chapter of a long countdown: Congress had already passed a 10-day patch in April and a 45-day extension on April 30 to buy negotiating time. A bipartisan three-year reauthorization deal had been nearly finalized before Trump's Pulte appointment collapsed the coalition.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the appointment "clearly out of bounds, unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to occur." Pulte had already used his brief tenure to launch investigations into Trump political opponents including Senators Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, New York AG Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook — raising legitimate concerns about a powerful surveillance apparatus in the hands of someone whose track record is opposition research. Republican Rep. Don Bacon acknowledged the dysfunction directly: "letting FISA lapse would reflect a nation paralyzed by hyper-partisanship."
Both characterizations are correct, which is the problem.
What Section 702 Actually Does
Section 702 authorizes the NSA to collect communications of foreign nationals located outside the United States without requiring individual court orders for each target. The government directs companies like Google, Verizon, and AT&T to hand over calls, emails, and texts in real time. The program's value to the intelligence community is substantial and, by official accounts, not easily replicated: the government has reported that roughly 60 percent of articles in the President's Daily Brief rely on Section 702 intelligence, that 70 percent of CIA drug disruption operations depend on it, and that 70 percent of CIA counterproliferation successes flow from it. These are not small margins.
But Section 702 has a structural civil liberties problem that has never been fixed. When Americans communicate with foreign targets, their messages are swept up in collection — and the FBI has conducted millions of so-called "backdoor searches" of that database without warrants. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board documented nearly five million U.S. person queries by the FBI from 2019 to 2022 alone, and concluded the government provided "little justification" for their value. The FBI searched the communications of peaceful protesters across the political spectrum, members of Congress, journalists, state-court judges, and 19,000 donors to a political campaign. A 2026 Senate Judiciary report cited by Sen. Ron Wyden found that sensitive warrantless searches — those involving journalists, political organizations, and religious groups — more than tripled in 2025. The FBI, despite a statutory requirement introduced in 2018, never once sought a warrant before conducting searches in criminal investigations through 2024.
This is the strongest case for the lapse: if the FBI cannot be trusted to self-police its backdoor access, and if Congress refuses to mandate warrants as a condition of reauthorization, then expiration is an acceptable instrument of accountability. The argument deserves to be taken seriously on its merits.
What the Lapse Doesn't Fix
That case, however, is significantly weakened by an underreported legal reality: the lapse is not switching off the program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court renewed Section 702 operational certifications on March 17, 2026. Under the statute's transition provision, those certifications — and the provider directives requiring telecoms and internet companies to assist with collection — remain in force until they reach their own expiry date. That expiry is approximately March 2027. Existing collection continues. The FBI can still query the database for Americans' communications without a warrant. The government simply cannot add new foreign targets.
The lapse is not a shutdown; it is a cap on new acquisitions. The constitutional problem at the heart of Section 702 — warrantless searches of Americans' data — is running on unchanged for at least nine more months. Democrats have used a surveillance law as a hostage against a personnel appointment, and the hostage is still in the room.
The right response to Pulte is Senate confirmation hearings, oversight subpoenas, legislative restrictions on the DNI's authority to investigate political opponents, and judicial challenge if his actions cross Fourth Amendment lines. These mechanisms exist. Using them would create durable accountability. Letting FISA lapse does not accomplish that — and it defers for months the serious reform debate that has been pending since the PCLOB's 2023 findings.
What Congress Should Do Now
The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act of 2024 (RISAA, Pub.L. 118-49) reauthorized Section 702 with enhanced training requirements and query oversight, but the most important reform — a warrant requirement before the FBI accesses Americans' communications within the database — was not included. Civil liberties organizations from the EFF to the Brennan Center to the Cato Institute converge on this point: absent that warrant floor, the backdoor search problem persists regardless of which administration is in power. With a 76 percent public majority supporting court-order requirements, the political conditions for this reform are favorable.
Congress should return from recess and pass a targeted, time-limited reauthorization tied explicitly to mandatory warrant requirements for U.S. person queries, with carve-outs for genuine emergency situations and cyberattack investigations where speed is operationally critical. What it should not do is conflate a surveillance reform agenda with a political dispute over an acting intelligence director — or allow the intelligence community to run on expired statutory authority for another year because lawmakers could not separate the two.