Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over ‘Unqualified’ Spy-Chief Pick

Cornyn said materials from Section 702 generate roughly 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief, a figure Senate Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley has also cited.

Some Republicans dispute the catastrophe framing. Representative Keith Self of Texas called the warnings “hysteria,” arguing that other FISA authorities remain in force and that proponents should accept reforms such as a warrant requirement: “FISA isn’t going dark. We have the law. We have precedent from 2008. Don’t fall for the scare tactics.” The libertarian Cato Institute has made a similar point.

“The [702] program has the FISA court’s permission to continue for another year, so it will continue whether we act or not,” said a senior Republican aide on a relevant committee. “None of the members saying the program is ending Friday will be claiming it’s actually dead on Monday—especially those on intel. They know better.”

Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, was sharper still. “If Republican leadership actually believed their baseless fearmongering about security at the World Cup, then they would do what needs to be done to get a deal to renew FISA by finally allowing votes on warrant requirements,” she said. “Any threats to national security during the World Cup fall squarely in the hands of Cotton, Grassley, and Trump officials who still refuse to allow votes on popular bipartisan reforms.” She added that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already ruled that 702 surveillance remains in effect until March 2027 under existing orders. This makes Johnson’s and Thune’s warnings about imminent national security consequences, in her view, a threat to civil liberties dressed up as urgency.

Even so, the Republican chairs of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley, respectively, have asked the administration to plan for a collection gap—including, if necessary, drafting an executive order to fill it.

Jake Laperruque, a surveillance policy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the standoff is a symptom of a deliberate process failure. “We don’t need to go through a sunset, and we don’t need to continue the same chaotic process of punting FISA with another short-term extension,” he said. “We can end the deadlock and resolve this issue now, but leadership needs to stop muzzling debate and allow a vote on warrants and reforms, like we’ve always had in the past. Blocking off reform votes is the reason we’re in this mess, and allowing votes on reforms is the only way out of it.”

The fight is unfolding as the government withholds two sets of records bearing on how Section 702 is used. In a June 3 letter to colleagues, Senator Ron Wyden wrote that warrantless searches sweeping in American politicians, activists, and journalists more than tripled in 2025 and that a still-secret FISA court opinion from March describes serious abuses. The administration has refused to declassify it, even after the Intelligence Committee’s leaders jointly asked for its release.

Separately, in a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Cato, the FBI disclosed in a June 4 court filing that it had identified roughly 39,650 potentially responsive pages of Section 702 noncompliance records, but said it will not begin releasing them until mid-August.