Trump to meet House speaker as pressure mounts over surveillance law deadline

Donald Trump is reportedly set to meet with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, at the White House on Tuesday as pressure mounts on the president to nominate a permanent director of national intelligence, the step some Republicans now believe is the only way to save a controversial and powerful surveillance law before it expires by the end of the week.

At stake is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a post-9/11 authority that allows US intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreign targets overseas without a court warrant. While the program is intended to target non-Americans abroad, it can also sweep up communications involving Americans. This powerful and contentious spy tool is set to expire at midnight on Thursday.

What that deadline does not mean, however, is that the surveillance program itself will go dark. The Fisa court issued a yearlong certification authorizing section 702 collection through approximately March 2027, and the statute contains a provision allowing collection to continue under that order even if the law lapses.

While there is often a crisis when it comes to reauthorizing the surveillance powers with some reforms, the latest issue traces back to Trump’s decision to install Bill Pulte, a housing finance official and political loyalist with absolutely no intelligence background, as the acting director of national intelligence earlier this month.

The move immediately collapsed a three-year bipartisan renewal deal, and all Senate Democrats but Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman voted to block the legislation. Seven Republicans also opposed the bill on civil liberties grounds, meaning neither a long-term nor a short-term patch currently has the 60 votes needed to keep the powers alive.

The Senate majority leader, John Thune, said on Monday that a credible permanent nominee was now the most plausible route out of the impasse.

“The administration probably, at some point, is going to have to come up with a permanent nominee that will be viewed by at least enough Democrats as sufficient to get their support,” he told Punchbowl News.

The sobering scale of the damage was made plain in an earlier letter sent to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, by two of the Senate’s most hawkish Republicans, intelligence committee chair, Tom Cotton, and judiciary committee chair, Chuck Grassley, both of whom spent months trying to get the bill passed.