US Surveillance Law Set to Expire After House Fails to Renew FISA Amid Controversy Over Trump Intelligence Appointment
Favour Bitrus
June 13, 2026
Picture Credit: Lexi Laginess
The United States government’s warrantless surveillance law is set to lapse for the first time in its history after the House of Representatives failed to pass a renewal bill before its Friday expiration deadline, with the vote collapsing in part over a controversial appointment by President Donald Trump to lead the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
The House voted 218 to 198 on the renewal bill, falling well short of the two-thirds majority required for passage. Nineteen Republican lawmakers voted against it. The next vote is not scheduled until 23 June, by which point the law will have already expired. Lawmakers have been away from Washington on a week-long break since the vote failed.
The law in question is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, specifically Section 702, which broadly authorizes US intelligence agencies to collect vast amounts of communications data, including information on American citizens, in order to identify foreign hackers, spies, and potential terrorists. Both Democrats and Republicans have historically considered it a critical national security tool, and bipartisan efforts to renew it had been underway for months before stalling.
The immediate flashpoint for the collapse was Trump’s appointment last week of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, the cabinet-level position overseeing more than a dozen spy agencies including the CIA and the NSA. Pulte has no intelligence or national security experience and was already heading a federal housing agency at the time of the appointment. Democrats warned the appointment posed a greater risk to national security than allowing the law to expire, citing fears that Pulte would weaponise the intelligence apparatus against the president’s political opponents.
On Thursday, the administration pulled Pulte’s nomination and replaced him with Jay Clayton, currently the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the reversal came too late. By then, most lawmakers had already left Washington, making any last-minute legislative fix effectively impossible.
Picture Credit: Nils Huenerfuerst
The law’s roots in public controversy stretch back to 2013, when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents revealing the full scope of US global surveillance operations. Among the revelations were programs that gave the NSA access to communications flowing through undersea fiber optic cables that form the backbone of the internet, and broad access to user data from technology companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft through a program called PRISM. The disclosures revealed that Americans, though nominally protected from domestic surveillance under the Constitution, were being caught up in the program in significant numbers.
The expiration of the law does not mean the government’s surveillance programs will immediately stop. The spy programs authorized under FISA were certified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in March as part of an annual review process, meaning US authorities can continue using their tools under the existing authorization until March 2027. However, phone companies that provide call records to the government may be reluctant to continue doing so without a clear legal basis.
The US government also retains other surveillance powers, including Executive Order 12333, which grants near-unlimited authority to conduct surveillance globally.
The collapse of the renewal has revived long-standing concerns about how the law has been applied. Senator Ron Wyden, a senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has long raised alarms about FISA, warned earlier this year that the law continues to be used in ways that secretly violate the constitutional rights of Americans, based on a secret interpretation of Section 702 that most lawmakers are unaware of.
