Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the statute that lets the NSA compel providers to hand over foreigners' communications without a warrant, and that has for years incidentally swept up Americans' calls, texts, and emails in the process — lapsed at midnight on June 12, 2026. It is the first time the authority has gone dark since Congress created it in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, EFF confirmed.
The proximate cause was not, in the end, the years-long fight over warrants. On the night of June 11, the House took up H.R. 9238, a short-term extension to carry Section 702 to July 2, under a fast-track suspension procedure requiring a two-thirds majority. It failed, 198–218 — Nextgov/FCW reported the House then recessed until June 23, guaranteeing at least a week-long gap in statutory authority, unprecedented in the program's 18-year history. The trigger wasn't a substantive rewrite of surveillance policy — it was President Trump's installation of Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency chief with no intelligence, military, or congressional background, as acting Director of National Intelligence. Democrats, joined by a bloc of Republicans, refused to hand expanded (or even status-quo) surveillance authority to an office they didn't trust the appointee to run responsibly.
A month of near-misses before the lapse
This was not a snap decision. In April, the House passed a three-year, minimally-reformed extension 235–191, but it carried an unrelated rider banning a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that pairing was "not happening," sending both chambers scrambling for a clean 45-day patch instead. That patch bought time but not consensus. By June, negotiators still hadn't bridged the core disagreement — whether the FBI should need a warrant before searching Americans' communications inside the Section 702 database — and the Pulte fight removed whatever trust was left to paper over it.
The lapse is less dramatic than it sounds
Here is the part regulators and advocates on both sides underplay: surveillance did not stop on June 12. The FISA Court approved Section 702 certifications in March 2026, and under the statute's grandfathering provisions those certifications remain valid for collection until roughly March 2027, as the Cato Institute has noted. What actually lapsed is the government's ability to compel new providers to assist with new directives going forward — a real constraint, but not the blackout that intelligence officials warned about in the runup to the deadline. Executive Order 12333 collection, human intelligence, and partner-nation sharing are all unaffected.
Steelmanning the case for reauthorization
The strongest argument for renewing Section 702 quickly, and without new procedural hurdles, is a real one. Section 702 is credited by intelligence officials with providing a majority of the raw material in the President's Daily Brief and has reportedly disrupted plots ranging from ransomware campaigns to terrorist attacks abroad. Foreign targets don't stop communicating because Congress is gridlocked, and every week without a compelled-assistance mechanism is a week providers can decline new requests without legal cover, degrading collection against people who are, by design, not entitled to Fourth Amendment protection in the first place. Reauthorization hawks are not wrong that allowing the broader oversight architecture — FISC review, minimization procedures, mandatory reporting to Congress — to sunset alongside the collection authority removes exactly the checks that make the program defensible.
Why the warrant requirement should win anyway
But the reform coalition's core ask is not a radical one, and it already has judicial backing. In a memorandum and order made public January 21, 2025, the Eastern District of New York held in United States v. Hasbajrami that FBI queries of Americans' communications inside Section 702 databases are themselves Fourth Amendment searches, and that the government isn't automatically entitled to run them without a warrant or a recognized exception — the first ruling of its kind, building on a 2019 Second Circuit holding that such backdoor queries are legally distinct events from the initial, lawful foreign-targeted collection. That is not an activist theory; it is a district court applying ordinary Fourth Amendment doctrine to a database the government itself decided to build and keep. A targeted warrant requirement for U.S.-person queries — not a rewrite of the foreign-collection authority — would resolve the exact defect a federal court has already identified, without touching the program's actual value: intelligence on foreign targets who were never entitled to a warrant to begin with.
The irony of this lapse is that it was forced by a leadership dispute almost entirely disconnected from the merits, while the merits-based fix has been sitting in plain view since January 2025. Congress does not need another 45-day patch. It needs to write the Hasbajrami warrant standard into the statute, confirm a credible DNI, and pass a multi-year reauthorization that keeps the program's genuine foreign-intelligence value intact while closing the backdoor-search loophole a court has already found unconstitutional as applied. Anything short of that just guarantees the next expiration fight starts from the same place this one ended.