The Trump administration’s three senior national security officials wrote to congressional leaders on Friday pressing for renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before the Republican controlled Congress gives way in January. The letter, from Attorney General Todd Blanche, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, was addressed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, and said President Trump had urged them to extend the law now. Clayton and Ratcliffe had briefed the Gang of Eight on the programme’s status earlier in the week.
Section 702, enacted in 2008, authorises warrantless collection on foreign targets overseas, which in practice sweeps in large volumes of Americans’ communications. The statute itself expired in June amid a congressional impasse, after President Trump vowed to veto any FISA legislation unless lawmakers first passed an unrelated measure tightening voting restrictions. Collection continues because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s annual certification orders, issued in March, run until March 2027. The officials’ letter argues that obtaining a new set of certifications and translating them into operating instructions takes months, so Congress must start the renewal process by December 9 to prevent a gap, with collection authority itself expiring on March 16 if the law is not reauthorised.
The politics cut both ways. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a longstanding advocate of tighter limits on the programme, said the issue should wait for the next Congress, when Democrats will control both chambers. Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, in line to chair the House Intelligence Committee in January, said he had warned Ratcliffe and Clayton in a classified briefing this week that the administration should work with lawmakers in the lame duck session or face a new Congress far more sceptical of the law, under which a renewal would look radically different. Any bill needs 60 Senate votes to reach the floor, and attaching a renewal to the annual defence authorisation bill is the route reform advocates expect.
The renewal push also lands on an unresolved transparency dispute. Wyden and Senator Adam Schiff have charged that the administration is withholding a March 17, 2026 surveillance court opinion that faulted the search filters analysts use to pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data, then approved another year of collection anyway. The statutory 180 day window for reviewing that ruling for public release closed on September 13 without publication, and a coalition of civil liberties groups has urged leaders not to renew the programme while the ruling stays undisclosed. Administration officials call Section 702 the single most indispensable tool for protecting the homeland, crediting it with thwarting attacks including the planned 2024 attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.