House passes 3-year FISA 702 renewal 235-191, Senate next

The House passed the three-year renewal 235-191 after Speaker Mike Johnson spent more than two hours holding the floor vote open to persuade Republican holdouts. Twenty-two Republicans voted no — mostly conservatives who wanted either a shorter extension with more reforms or a warrant requirement — and 42 Democrats voted yes, providing the bipartisan margin that made passage possible. The bill was packaged with procedural rules for the farm bill and a DHS funding framework, making the vote a three-in-one procedural maneuver.

The bill includes criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for agents who misuse Section 702 surveillance data, a requirement that FBI agents obtain written approval from supervisory attorneys before running queries involving Americans' information, and a mandate that all queries be logged and reported to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The bill does not include the warrant requirement that would prohibit agencies from searching Americans' communications in the collected data without a court order.

The warrant requirement for backdoor searches has been the central unresolved dispute over Section 702 since at least 2014. In 2024, a warrant amendment to the prior FISA reauthorization tied 212-212 in the House and failed for lack of a majority. The 2026 bill does not include that amendment. House Freedom Caucus members including Reps.

Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Mark Harris (R-NC), Michael Cloud (R-TX), and Ralph Norman (R-SC) offered amendments that would have required warrants or limited the reauthorization to three months, but those amendments were blocked by the Rules Committee. The Brennan Center for Justice, which has tracked Section 702 compliance, reported in April 2026 that the FISA Court found in March 2026 that filtering tools used to conduct backdoor searches are a problem 'across the intelligence community' — not just at the FBI. The FISA Court opinion is classified, but the New York Times reported that while one specific FBI tool was discontinued, the bureau was using 'another tool' with the same functionality. This ongoing noncompliance occurred after Congress had already passed 56 reforms in the 2024 RISAA reauthorization.

The Senate was poised to add amendments that the House bill did not include, most importantly a warrant requirement for backdoor searches. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that linking the FISA bill to other House priorities — such as the farm bill — was 'not happening,' signaling the Senate intended to handle FISA on its own terms. If the Senate amended the bill, it would need to return to the House for another vote, potentially creating a lapse in the statutory authority even if the underlying FISA Court certifications kept the surveillance program technically operational.

The FISA Court certifications renewed in March 2026 authorize Section 702 collection until approximately March 2027 regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes the statute. This operational reality undermined some of the urgency around the April 30 statutory deadline, but intelligence officials and the Trump administration argued that a statutory lapse could create legal uncertainty for companies required to assist with the surveillance. Companies that fail to comply with valid FISA directives face fines of $250,000 per day.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) supported the clean three-year reauthorization without a warrant requirement, reversing his 2024 position when he voted for the warrant amendment and against the prior RISAA reauthorization. Jordan said the 56 reforms enacted in 2024 had made 'a huge difference' and that the 2026 political context was different, pointing to Trump administration oversight as an additional check. Civil liberties advocates from both left and right criticized Jordan's reversal as abandoning the coalition that had nearly passed a warrant requirement in 2024.

The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) passed in April 2024 as the previous two-year reauthorization. A DOJ inspector general report in 2025 found the FBI had implemented RISAA's required querying reforms and that noncompliant queries had 'been reduced substantially.' However, the Brennan Center and other critics argued that reduced noncompliance with internal rules did not address the underlying constitutional problem of warrantless access to Americans' communications.

The 10-day stopgap extension that set the April 30 deadline itself came after the House initially failed to pass longer-term extensions. House Republican leadership had planned an 18-month extension, then a five-year extension, both of which failed to gain sufficient floor votes because of internal divisions over warrant requirements, the Central Bank Digital Currency ban added to the bill as a conservative sweetener, and parliamentary disputes. The Senate passed the 10-day stopgap by unanimous consent after the House also passed it unanimously.

This pattern repeated a dynamic from Section 702's history: Congress has never enacted a warrant requirement despite sustained bipartisan advocacy, but successive reauthorizations have added incremental procedural reforms. The 2026 bill follows the same pattern, expanding criminal liability and supervisory approval requirements while leaving the underlying warrantless access architecture intact. Privacy advocates from organizations including the Brennan Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and ACLU say these reforms are insufficient because they rely on internal agency self-policing rather than independent judicial oversight.

Section 702 targets include not only terrorism suspects but foreign government officials, academics, journalists, business executives, and scientists. Americans who communicate with these targets have their messages swept into the database. The government tracks approximately 350,000 foreign targets annually, and the database contains communications that span years. The number of backdoor searches conducted by U.S.

intelligence agencies is classified, but the FBI alone conducted hundreds of thousands of warrantless searches per year before RISAA's reforms, according to Brennan Center analysis of available data. The constitutional status of backdoor searches remains unresolved at the appellate level. A December 2024 district court ruling found them unconstitutional.

The Second Circuit held in 2019 that U.S. person queries are 'separate Fourth Amendment events' distinguishable from the initial collection, strengthening the case for warrant requirements. The Supreme Court has not addressed the constitutionality of backdoor searches, meaning the constitutional debate will continue regardless of whether Congress includes a warrant requirement in the 2026 reauthorization.