A bipartisan privacy coalition in the United States Congress introduced legislation on Thursday that would impose a strict warrant requirement on the FBI’s backdoor searches of Americans’ communications, aligning federal law with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional.
The bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026, repeals controversial expansions of the government’s warrantless wiretapping authority while overhauling key aspects of federal surveillance law—setting up a showdown with the US intelligence community and its congressional allies weeks before a sweeping global spy program sunsets on April 20.
Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Lee are leading the legislative push alongside Representatives Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren. The measure carries endorsements from civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum.
The legislation arrives in a surveillance landscape fundamentally altered since 2024, when Congress last renewed the wiretap program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The bill’s sponsors framed the Government Surveillance Reform Act as a necessary corrective to a surveillance state that has been supercharged by modern technology and bureaucratic mission creep. Wyden noted that the explosion of commercially available data and rapid advances in AI have “far outpaced the laws protecting Americans’ privacy.”
Davidson echoed that sentiment, arguing that Section 702 has been stretched “far beyond its original purpose” to enable unconstitutional domestic searches.
Section 702 permits the federal government to collect the communications of foreigners located outside the US without a warrant. In practice, the program sweeps up vast quantities of communications belonging to American citizens, permanent residents, and others on US soil.
The FBI routinely scours this intercepted data to read the private messages of Americans without a warrant, a practice privacy advocates call a “backdoor search.”
In a floor speech earlier this week, Wyden warned that Congress is debating reauthorization without a complete picture of the government’s activities. “There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans,” he said, noting that successive administrations have refused to declassify the matter. “When it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
The internal oversight mechanisms meant to check the government’s sweeping powers have been systematically dismantled over the past year. FBI Director Kash Patel, who previously criticized the warrantless searches, flipped on the issue after taking office. He now defends the program as a “critical tool.”
In May 2025, Patel shuttered the FBI’s Office of Internal Auditing, the compliance unit that drove a reduction in improper searches of Americans’ data from more than 119,000 in 2022 to just 5,518 in 2024. The FBI heavily touted that improved compliance rate two years ago as a primary argument for why a warrant requirement wasn’t needed.
The FBI declined to make a statement.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has overseen a similar hollowing out of independent watchdogs, including the mass firing of inspectors general and the incapacitation of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Gabbard also faces a whistleblower complaint alleging she shared National Security Agency intercepts with the White House for political purposes.
Gabbard’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This erasure of internal guardrails coincides with a broader deployment of law enforcement tools against domestic targets. Following a 2024 directive from former FBI deputy director Paul Abbate urging agents to actively run queries on Americans to justify the program’s existence, as first reported by WIRED, the current administration has raided the homes of journalists and issued a presidential memorandum redirecting counterterrorism resources toward domestic political groups.
