House Speaker Mike Johnson convened a vote in the dead of night on Friday, calling lawmakers back to the floor after midnight in a push to preserve a surveillance program that allows federal agents to read the communications of Americans without a warrant. Twenty Republicans broke ranks and sank it, a sharp rebuke of both Johnson and President Donald Trump, who had spent the week personally working holdouts to back the bill.
The failed vote caps weeks of bipartisan resistance to a clean reauthorization of the surveillance program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The 702 program permits wiretaps of communications ostensibly belonging to foreigners overseas, but is also known to intercept vast amounts of Americans’ emails, texts, phone calls, and other data—private messages that the FBI and other agencies routinely access without a warrant.
Congressional authorization for the program will expire on Tuesday. The White House and GOP leadership have spent weeks pressing for a “clean” reauthorization, fending off a bipartisan alliance of House Freedom Caucus Republicans and progressive Democrats demanding, variously, that the FBI obtain warrants before searching Americans’ messages and that Congress ban the government from buying Americans’ personal data from commercial brokers.
A handful of Democrats led by Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have joined the White House in lobbying against new restrictions.
House Republicans revolted twice in the small hours of Friday morning, ultimately sinking the bill. Shortly after 1 am ET, a dozen Republicans joined nearly every Democrat to kill a leadership-backed amendment that would have extended Section 702 for five more years.
The amendment contained a provision that was in essence a fake warrant requirement. It would have prohibited government officers from “intentionally” targeting Americans’ communications without a warrant—conduct that is already banned by the statute. It also offered the government a warrant path if agents had probable cause to suspect the subject is an agent of a foreign power—an authority that already exists independent of the Section 702 program and adds functionally nothing new to the law.
The final blow came after 2 am, when the 20 Republicans voted again to block the original version of the bill, which seeks a shorter 18-month extension. Those 20 votes were drawn almost entirely from the House Freedom Caucus and the party’s libertarian wing, including Andy Harris of Maryland, the caucus chair; Thomas Massie of Kentucky; Chip Roy of Texas; Warren Davidson of Ohio; and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
In a rare defeat on a procedural vote that typically passes along party lines, GOP leaders walked away with only a 10-day extension, pushing the fight to the end of the month. The House’s failure leaves the Senate to sort out what comes next, starting with whether to approve the extension next week.
The vote’s collapse followed a week of hard effort by the Trump administration to assuage Republicans who’ve objected to the FBI’s warrantless access and its documented history of querying that data for political purposes. Trump hosted Freedom Caucus holdouts at the White House on Tuesday, trying to close the deal. Democrats, meanwhile, were briefed Monday by two former senior Biden officials urging them to back the extension, according to a person familiar with both events.
The FBI has used Section 702 data to run warrantless queries on a US senator, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, Black Lives Matter protesters, and both sides of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to declassified court rulings and government transparency reports.
