Negotiators hopeful for deal on spy powers amid messy battle over reforms

New deadline. Same problems.

Lawmakers last week punted the battle to renew the nation’s spy powers for 10 days, extending not only the deadline to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but also the difficult discussions over how to reform it.

The program allows the government to spy on foreigners located abroad, but privacy hawks want to require a warrant before authorities can review any information collected on Americans speaking with those being surveilled.

Some dynamics, however, have shifted since last week. The remarkable failure of the House GOP to pass either a reform package brokered with the right wing or a straight reauthorization has forced the party into bipartisan discussions.

And deadline concerns in the Senate have sparked discussions about moving the bill in that chamber first to act before it expires on April 30.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) may have been looking to preempt that idea, telling reporters Wednesday he could bring a FISA bill to the floor as soon as Thursday. Several members involved in the talks, however, appeared caught by surprise and said they hadn’t seen the bill.

While those shifts mean more lawmakers are involved in the ongoing discussions, members on both sides of the issue say things are largely at a standstill.

“We’re in a stationary mode right now,” said Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who would prefer the bill be extended without a warrant requirement.

“We don’t really know exactly what the next step is,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is staunchly in the warrant-requirement camp.

“We’ve got no guidance on where we are.”

Some warrant proponents, however, indicated there are reasons to be optimistic.

“There are three or four developments that are genuinely different,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), another proponent of a warrant requirement, told The Hill.

He nodded to a series of votes in the wee hours of Friday morning, when 20 Republicans crossed the aisle to block a clean extension of Section 702, a vote where four Democrats crossed the aisle to advance it.

“The fact that only four Democrats, you know, rejected reform, I thought was a big development. You’ve got 20 Republicans in the House clearly being for reform based on what they’ve said, and a lot of Democrats, who were cautious about reform before are now saying, ‘Are we really going to let Donald Trump be in charge of this?’ And they have indicated that that’s not where they want to go,” he said.

“All three of those developments are different than anything we’ve had before.”

Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the biggest change is that the discussions have turned bipartisan.

“We may have had a little bit of a positive turn, because I think the two leaderships, the Speaker and the minority leader may be talking,” he said.

“It feels to me like the Republicans have thrown in the towel on hope for a rule, and so they’re coming back, recognizing that this is a problem where there are lots of skeptics on both sides of the aisle.”

The battle over how to proceed largely centers on the same question: whether and how to add a warrant requirement.

Those opposed to requiring warrants see the request as unworkable.

“Getting a warrant that contains already lawfully collected data, that would literally shut the system down. I don’t know what they don’t understand about that,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told reporters.

He equated it to making police officers get a warrant to run a license plate number — a widespread practice where police can tap existing databases to see if a driver has a call out for their arrest.

“You’re saying that you now need a warrant, not for the collection of evidence, but the querying of already lawfully collected data? That’s crossing a Rubicon we’ve never crossed in the history of our country. When it comes to law enforcement, we’ve never required that. So it’s not a warrant. It’s a double warrant,” he said.

LaHood on Tuesday also vented frustration at those seeking a warrant requirement, saying they were failing to take into account a package of 56 reforms passed when Section 702 was last reauthorized in 2024. Those reforms included provisions to shrink the pool of who could query the FISA database and require the sign-off of a supervisor.

That and a tech fix simply requiring agents to opt into searching the 702 database have seen searches on Americans plummet by 2.9 million in 2022 to just more than 9,000 in the year after the last renewal of Section 702.

“The arguments on the other side completely fall flat in terms of the arguments they’re making. We pass statutes or pass laws to remedy a problem, to fix something. So what I’ve said is ‘What needs to be fixed since what we did in RISA two years ago?’ Give me facts. Give me evidence,” LaHood said, referring to the acronym of the prior reauthorization bill.

“Name me an instance, a case, a set of facts, egregious behavior, where two years later, ‘Oh, we should have had a warrant last year or six months ago or three months ago, we needed that warrant,’ because nobody can name it. Nobody can articulate it, nobody can give me a factual scenario because it doesn’t exist.”

Warrant proponents, on the other hand, see it as a critical protection to safeguard Americans whose data might be collected if they communicate with the foreign targets who are being surveilled.

“There are 1,000 ideas out there about how to get through this. And what’s clear from what took place on the floor is that there’s a commanding majority within the chamber that’s interested in making sure that the privacy rights and civil liberties of the people are protected at the same time that we’re protecting our national security, and we should be able to figure out a way to reconcile both of the values,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who earlier this year urged fellow Democrats to resist renewing Section 702 without more checks on President Trump.

Roy, who would like to see a more stringent warrant requirement, said the issue is also part of broader tension with the intelligence community, which, he said, “has never once walked into a room and said, ‘Here’s all our power. Let’s give some back.’ That will never happen. We have to take the power back and make sure that they’re following the right procedures and make sure people’s rights are being protected.”

“Those of us who want to protect individual rights, we want as much as we can get, and we understand within reason. You got to make sure that you can go stop an attack. You got to go stop bad actors,” he said.

With Democrats now more involved in conversations, a proposal by Himes may be gaining some steam.

Under his proposal, the intelligence community wouldn’t need to get a probable cause warrant to review information collected on Americans, but they would still need to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to demonstrate the information would be “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”

Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, would like to see a more stringent warrant requirement, but he said, “Himes has a product that we’re interested in. Let’s go figure it out.”

“If you’re putting all this on a scale, I think Himes adds some protections that I think are valuable. I’d like to go further. I think the Biggs amendment is stronger, obviously,” he said, referring to a package from fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) that would require a warrant but offers numerous exceptions.

“Somewhere in between, that is probably a landing spot where I think we can end up. But I think Himes is a good-faith effort. I think this is a bipartisan agreement that that’s a good-faith effort, and lets all sit down and talk about it.”

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