For years, Donald Trump campaigned as the man who would drain the swamp and dismantle the surveillance apparatus that had been turned against him. His 2016 victory was fueled in part by outrage over a weaponized FBI, an intelligence community that treated his campaign like a foreign adversary, and a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process that approved warrants based on opposition research paid for by his rival. So when President Trump threw his support behind the reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA just days before its April 19, 2026 expiration, many of his most loyal supporters were left asking a simple question. What happened to the man who promised to end the abuses?
Section 702 is the surveillance authority that allows the National Security Agency to collect the electronic communications of foreigners located overseas without a warrant. In theory, Americans are not the target. In practice, the program vacuums up an enormous amount of American data because Americans communicate constantly with people outside the country. The NSA has acknowledged that this authority results in the collection of hundreds of millions of communications every year. Once that data sits in government databases, federal agencies can query it using American names, phone numbers, and email addresses, often without first obtaining a warrant.
That is not a hypothetical concern. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court itself documented that the FBI conducted more than 278,000 improper queries of American data collected under Section 702 between 2020 and 2021. Those queries included searches involving January 6 protesters, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, congressional donors, and a state judge. If the FBI was willing to misuse this power against a wide range of Americans while under intense public scrutiny, there is no reason to believe a future administration will show more restraint.
From Reform Promises to Reauthorization
During his first term, Trump appeared to understand the danger. He railed against the FISA abuses exposed in the Inspector General report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. He watched as the FBI obtained surveillance warrants against Carter Page using the Steele dossier, a document funded by the Clinton campaign and later described by the Inspector General as containing statements that were false or unsupported. He saw firsthand how a surveillance state built for foreign terrorists could be redirected against a domestic political opponent.
Yet the reauthorization package Trump now supports does almost nothing to address the core problem. It leaves in place the practice of warrantless backdoor searches of American communications. It does not impose meaningful criminal penalties on officials who misuse the database. It does not require the FBI or other agencies to obtain a warrant before querying an American's identifier, despite years of promises from reformers in both parties. The reforms that are included are largely cosmetic, designed to give political cover to members who want to vote yes while avoiding any real limits on the intelligence community.
This is a stark reversal from the posture Trump adopted during the 2024 campaign, when he regularly warned that the deep state would target his supporters if given the chance. He was right then. The same agencies that surveilled his 2016 campaign later worked with social media companies to suppress reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, labeled legitimate conservative organizing as domestic extremism, and used national security authorities to monitor parents protesting at school board meetings. Handing those agencies a fresh reauthorization of their most powerful surveillance tool is not draining the swamp. It is refilling it.
The Same FBI, the Same Abuses
Defenders of Section 702 insist the program is essential for stopping terrorists and catching foreign spies. No serious person disputes that signals intelligence has a role in national security. But the question before Congress is not whether to spy on terrorists overseas. It is whether to continue allowing American agencies to search through the incidental data of American citizens without a warrant.
The record could not be clearer. In addition to the 278,000 improper FBI queries, oversight reports have repeatedly found that agents queried the Section 702 database for reasons unrelated to foreign intelligence, including criminal investigations that lacked any national security nexus. The FBI has promised to do better after each disclosure, and each time a new report reveals the same pattern of abuse. Trusting the same bureaucracy with a five or six year reauthorization, rather than demanding fundamental reform first, is an invitation to more of the same.
It is also worth remembering who will wield this power. The current FBI leadership has shown little interest in correcting the political abuses of the past. The intelligence community as a whole has resisted transparency at every turn, fighting in court to keep Americans from learning how broadly their data is being collected. Reauthorizing Section 702 without requiring a warrant for American queries tells these institutions that Congress has learned nothing from the last decade of scandals.
Conservatives Must Reclaim the Anti-Surveillance Mantle
There was a time when conservatives understood that a government powerful enough to surveil your political enemies is powerful enough to surveil you. The founders enshrined the Fourth Amendment precisely because they knew that unchecked search powers would inevitably be used to punish dissent and protect the ruling class. A warrant requirement is not a technicality. It is the constitutional mechanism that forces the government to show probable cause before invading the privacy of the people.
Trump had an opportunity to lead on this issue. He could have demanded that any reauthorization include a warrant requirement for queries of American data. He could have insisted on real penalties for abuses, independent oversight, and transparency reports that tell the public how often these powers are used. Instead, he sided with the intelligence community and the leadership of both parties against the reformers in his own coalition.
The result is a bill that gives the deep state its favorite weapon back and asks nothing in return. Conservatives who spent years condemning FISA abuse now face a choice. They can follow the lead of politicians who want to look tough on national security, or they can return to first principles and demand that any surveillance authority directed at Americans comply with the Constitution. The deep state is not going to reform itself. And if even Donald Trump will not stand in the way, the rest of the conservative movement will have to do it without him.
