The House on Wednesday voted to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law for three years, but the fate of the measure was uncertain as the Senate vowed to make changes that could delay final passage past the program’s midnight expiration on Thursday.
Bipartisan approval of the bill capped a chaotic struggle in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson just barely overcame a rebellion by a libertarian-leaning faction of Republicans who had blocked the legislation as they demanded a chance to add privacy protections.
After trying and failing to bring up the measure earlier this month and then again on Tuesday, the speaker struggled for more than two hours on Wednesday to round up the votes to bring up the surveillance bill, threatening and cajoling holdout Republicans before they ultimately caved and allowed the legislation to move ahead.
The vote was 235 to 191 to extend a key section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, without changes, sending the bill to the Senate. Forty-two Democrats crossed party lines to support the measure, while 22 Republicans opposed it.
The law, known as Section 702 of FISA, is set to expire at midnight on Thursday. The bill to extend it will need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. A bipartisan group of privacy-minded lawmakers — including Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah — wants to add new limits to government wiretapping and data collection.
Further complicating matters, as part of his effort to persuade libertarian-minded Republicans to stop blockading the bill in the House, Mr. Johnson bundled the FISA bill with unrelated legislation they favor that would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing digital currency. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said that measure was a dead letter in his chamber, meaning that the Senate may attempt to strip it out and send the bill back to the House without it.
Proponents of quickly extending the law without major changes have warned that any lapse in Section 702 would cause the government to “go dark,” and would gravely threaten national security. Similar arguments played out in April 2024, when the law was last about to expire and reached the Senate with little time to spare.
Those warnings are misleading. Section 702 has a built-in safety net for a temporary lapse that allows the surveillance program to keep operating until annual certifications issued by the nation’s intelligence court expire. The court recertified the program last month, meaning the National Security Agency could legally continue to operate the program through March 2027 even if the statute were to expire.
Still, current and former national security officials caution that a lapse in the statute could lead some technology companies to stop cooperating with the program until the intelligence court orders them to resume. That prospect raises the possibility of short-term gaps in data collection from any such firms while litigation plays out.
Section 702 permits the government to collect — from U.S. companies like Google and AT&T, and without a warrant — the private messages of foreigners abroad, even when the targets are communicating with Americans. Congress enacted it in 2008, legalizing a form of a once-secret warrantless wiretapping program created by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But it added a “sunset” provision that causes it to expire, ensuring that the law would periodically come up for review and potential modification.
The extension bill would extend the statute by three years while making minor tweaks to it. Among them, it would make it a crime to intentionally search the repository of collected messages for an American’s information without a proper purpose. Only F.B.I. lawyers could preapprove queries for Americans’ information, and the measure would add another layer of after-the-fact review of such queries.
Privacy advocates have long wanted to require the government to obtain a warrant from a judge before it can deliberately access information from or about an American in the repository of messages collected under the program. That debate scrambles the usual polarized partisan lines, with civil liberties-minded lawmakers in both parties squaring off against centrists and security hawks in both parties, who oppose the idea.
President Trump has urged Republicans to extend Section 702 without new limits for 18 months. That effort ran aground in the House two weeks ago.
Given the G.O.P.’s slim House majority that leaves little room for defections, the struggle to pass the FISA measure played out entirely among Republicans. A sufficient number of libertarian-minded Republicans associated with the Freedom Caucus defied Mr. Johnson and blocked the bill in an overnight session early on April 17.
Still short of an agreement, Mr. Johnson scrapped a planned vote on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, it appeared opponents would block the measure from the House floor once again, leading to hours of furious negotiation before the holdouts acquiesced.
According to lawmakers familiar with the talks, Mr. Johnson’s haggling included unrelated deals to change a pending farm bill.
