The debate over the government’s purported misuse of surveillance tools to spy on U.S. citizens has erupted once again as lawmakers on Capitol Hill wrangle over whether or not to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for 18 months, which the Trump administration has lobbied for as the provision is set to expire on April 20.

Section 702 of FISA governs the U.S. government’s surveillance of foreigners abroad, primarily suspected terrorists or other actors who are seen as a threat to national security, subjecting the surveillance to intermittent judicial review. As noted by National Review’s editorial board, “Where Section 702 and its predecessors become controversial is that surveillance of the communications of foreigners abroad may sweep in their conversations with Americans.” The board further points out that “such powers can be used pretextually to spy on Americans on the other end of the phone, text, or email” and that after surveillance agencies have collected the data, “[it] can be mined in a targeted way — especially by the FBI — for information whose original collection may have been honestly incidental.”

Government reports have indicated that Section 702 has been used improperly dozens of times in past years, with one audit revealing that the FBI “searched FISA information 40 times” in 2020 “while investigating a wide range of purely domestic crimes, including health-care fraud, gang violence, domestic terrorism by ‘racially motivated violent extremists,’ and public corruption.”

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) canceled a scheduled vote to renew FISA after it became clear that a group of “hard-liner” Republicans would refuse to vote for the measure without policy changes. But the White House is reportedly frustrated by the group, arguing that a clean reauthorization of FISA is essential to stopping terror attacks on the U.S. homeland, particularly during a war with Iran, the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in the world. As noted by NRO, the measure is also used “for counterintelligence and interdiction of drug trafficking and human trafficking.”

But GOP lawmakers like Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) say that the Trump administration’s request for an 18-month clean reauthorization with no amendments is unlikely to happen due to the concerns of numerous congressmen that the constitutional rights of Americans are being infringed upon despite the safeguards currently governing Section 702.

“[W]e know that warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens is still taking place,” he contended during “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Wednesday. “Yes, we put in reforms two years ago, but we know without a doubt that warrantless surveillance of American citizens still continues. That is a violation of the Fourth Amendment — unreasonable search and seizure — so we are standing on the Constitution to make sure that we get something about a warrant so that we can put [in] some guardrails. Look, everybody wants 702 to continue. Our military uses it. We want to get the bad guys as much as anybody else does. But we must protect our citizens under the Fourth Amendment.”

Self went on to argue that FISA’s surveillance powers become problematic when it is used for non-emergencies.

“[With regard to a] normal situation where it is not an emergency, not an exigent situation, we just asked, ‘Look, we have an idea to actually put a judge on the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] to do nothing but approve warrants. It doesn’t take one or two days to write a warrant. It takes 10 minutes to call the judge, lay out your case, get the warrant, and go execute it. So we believe it’s vitally important for where it’s needed.”

Nonetheless, it appears that improper searches of the FISA database have declined significantly in recent years, as mandated reporting to Congress revealed that searches on U.S. citizens plunged from 2.9 million in 2022 to only 9,000 last year. Meanwhile, government data shows that Section 702 surveillance of foreign targets continues to snowball, surging from 246,000 in 2022 to 349,823 in 2025. In addition, the importance of the data is underscored by the fact that “60 percent of the items in the President’s Daily Brief incorporated the fruits of Section 702 surveillance” in 2023.

Still, Self emphasized that a more extensive requirement for warrants should be put in place before FISA surveillance powers can be used. “It provides what every law enforcement agency knows to do — go get a warrant before you incarcerate, before you attack, before you arrest American citizens. It is fundamental to our justice system.”