Current status: Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which contains Section 702, was set to be repealed on June 12, 2026, and no further extension was enacted. The date came from S. 4465 (Public Law 119-87), the second of two short extensions signed in April 2026. On June 11, 2026 the House rejected a third stop-gap, H.R. 9238, which would have carried the authorities to July 2, 2026, by a vote of 198 to 218 under a suspension of the rules that needed a two-thirds majority. Congress.gov's list of every law enacted in this Congress, refetched on September 1, 2026, records no law after Public Law 119-87 whose title names the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That list carries titles only, and in 2023 an extension rode inside a defense authorization bill, so a title search is a floor rather than a guarantee.

What the statute does with collection already under way is written into Section 404 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which the repeal clause expressly carves out; its subsection (b) is the part that covers Title VII. Any order, authorization or directive issued under Title VII before the repeal date continues in effect until it expires, and Title VII keeps applying to it until the later of that expiry or final judgment in any litigation about it. A joint authorization under Section 702 runs for up to one year. Section 404(b) speaks only to what was already issued: its five paragraphs cover the continued effect of those orders, the continued application of Title VII to them, challenges and liability, reporting, and a transition provision from 2008 that has long since run out. None of them provides for issuing anything new.

This tracker documents every 2026 measure that would have moved the Title VII shut-off date, drawing on the bill text and roll-call records in LegislationPatch's database and on the United States Code text of the sections involved.

The four 2026 measures, in order

H.R. 8035 - the 18-month extension the House never voted on

Introduced: March 24, 2026
Would have run to: October 20, 2027
Outcome: its rule, H. Res. 1175, was rejected 197 to 228 on April 17, 2026 (Roll no. 124)

H.R. 8035 would have replaced the shut-off trigger inherited from the 2024 reform law - which ran two years from that law's approval on April 20, 2024 - with a fixed repeal date of October 20, 2027. It also rewrote the heading and internal citations of Section 404(b), the clause that decides how long already-issued orders survive a repeal.

The House Rules Committee reported H. Res. 1175 on April 15, 2026, providing one hour of general debate on H.R. 8035, allowing a motion to recommit, and closing the bill to amendments. Two days later the House rejected the resolution 197 to 228, so H.R. 8035 never reached a vote on passage. The Judiciary and Intelligence committees, to which it was referred, have not reported it.

The bill signed the following day carried the same Section 404(b) conforming amendments, word for word. The difference between the two was the date: October 20, 2027 in H.R. 8035, April 30, 2026 in the bill that became law.

Read our full analysis of H.R. 8035 on LegislationPatch →

H.R. 8322 - the first short extension

Public Law: 119-84
Approved: April 18, 2026
Set the shut-off at: April 30, 2026

H.R. 8322 struck the words "effective two years after" and everything following them from the sunset clause and inserted a fixed date: effective April 30, 2026, Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is repealed. It made the parallel change to the second paragraph of the clause, which governs a conforming amendment to the federal wiretap statute, and made the Section 404(b) conforming amendments described above. It changed nothing else - no new minimization requirement, no new oversight mechanism, no restriction on queries of the collected data. Its amendments took effect on the earlier of enactment or April 19, 2026.

Read our full analysis of H.R. 8322 on LegislationPatch →

S. 4465 - the second short extension

Public Law: 119-87
Approved: April 30, 2026
Set the shut-off at: June 12, 2026 - 43 days further out

S. 4465 struck April 30, 2026 and inserted June 12, 2026 in both paragraphs of the sunset clause, and did nothing else. It was approved on the same day the date it was replacing would have taken effect, and its amendments were written to take effect on the earlier of enactment or April 29, 2026. This is the extension that set the June 12 shut-off; H.R. 9238's text names Public Law 119-87 as the most recent amendment to the clause.

Read our full analysis of S. 4465 on LegislationPatch →

H.R. 9238 - the stop-gap the House rejected

Introduced: June 10, 2026
Would have run to: July 2, 2026 - 20 more days
Outcome: failed 198 to 218 on June 11, 2026 (Roll no. 221)

H.R. 9238 struck June 12, 2026 and inserted July 2, 2026 in both paragraphs of the sunset clause, and would have taken effect on the earlier of enactment or June 11, 2026. The Judiciary and Intelligence committees were discharged the day it was introduced. The House debated it for forty minutes on June 10 under a suspension of the rules, postponed further proceedings, and defeated it the next day 198 to 218 - short of the two-thirds a suspension requires, and short of a simple majority. Twenty-six members voted against the majority of their own party, and fifteen did not vote.

Read our full analysis of H.R. 9238 on LegislationPatch →

What FISA Section 702 Actually Authorizes

Section 702 is codified at 50 U.S.C. 1881a. It lets the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence jointly authorize, for up to one year at a time, the targeting of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information. The statute says in terms that nothing in FISA's traditional surveillance procedures requires an application for a court order for an acquisition targeted under this section at a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States.

To carry an acquisition out, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence may direct an electronic communication service provider, in writing, to immediately provide the Government with all information, facilities, or assistance necessary to accomplish it, and to keep records of the assistance under security procedures they approve. The Government compensates the provider at the prevailing rate. Since 2024 the definition of an electronic communication service provider has also covered any other service provider with access to equipment being used, or that may be used, to transmit or store wire or electronic communications - with carve-outs for public accommodation facilities, dwellings, community facilities, and food service establishments.

The statute sets six limits on an acquisition authorized this way. It may not intentionally target anyone known at the time to be located in the United States; may not target a person abroad when the purpose is to get at a particular known person in the United States; may not intentionally target a U.S. person abroad; may not intentionally acquire a communication whose sender and all intended recipients are known to be in the United States; may not intentionally acquire communications that merely contain a reference to a target rather than being to or from one; and must be conducted consistently with the Fourth Amendment.

The reason the authority is contested is what happens to the data afterwards. The statute itself devotes a subsection to queries: the Attorney General must adopt querying procedures for information collected under Section 702, and must ensure those procedures keep a record of every United States person query term used. Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel must get prior approval from a supervisor or an authorized attorney before running a U.S. person query term against unminimized Section 702 material, unless they reasonably believe the query could help mitigate a threat to life or serious bodily harm. FBI queries solely designed to find and extract evidence of criminal activity are prohibited outright, subject to the same threat-to-life exception and a litigation-preservation exception. The same subsection bars political appointees - people the Office of Personnel Management classifies as Presidential appointments, noncareer Senior Executive Service appointments or Schedule C excepted appointments - from the FBI's query approval process. Those are the rules Congress wrote because U.S. person communications end up in the collection. The agency they are addressed to is the Federal Bureau of Investigation; neither the National Security Agency nor the Central Intelligence Agency is named anywhere in Section 702.

How the 2024 reform law set up 2026

The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, Public Law 118-49, was approved on April 20, 2024 and rewrote the sunset clause so that Title VII would be repealed two years later. It also rewrote much of Section 702's query subsection, added a requirement that the FBI Director issue minimum accountability standards, and required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to seek new court orders within 90 days of enactment. Separately it struck the exception that had allowed the acquisition of communications merely referring to a target, leaving that prohibition flat, and repealed the 2018 congressional notice-and-review process that had governed any resumption of that collection.

That two-year clock is what expired in April 2026 and produced the sequence above.

What the shut-off means

Because no extension or reauthorization was enacted before June 12, 2026, the repeal clause in Section 403(b)(1) of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 took effect. The same clause carves out Section 404, so orders, authorizations and directives already issued under Title VII continue until they expire, and Title VII continues to apply to them until the later of that expiry or final judgment in related litigation. Section 403(b)(2) separately strikes the reference to a FISA section 704 court order from 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(a)(ii)(A) - one of the two showings a communications provider must be given before it may lawfully furnish surveillance assistance, the other being a written certification.

The clause has carried a different date at every stage of its life. The 2008 Act set the repeal at December 31, 2012. Public Law 112-238 replaced that with December 31, 2017; Public Law 115-118 replaced that with December 31, 2023; Public Law 118-31 replaced that with April 19, 2024; the 2024 reform law replaced the fixed date with a trigger running two years from its own approval; and Public Laws 119-84 and 119-87 set the final two dates, April 30 and June 12, 2026.

The nearest earlier case to 2026 is April 2024. The clause then set the repeal at April 19, 2024, and the law that replaced that date, Public Law 118-49, was approved on April 20, 2024. The full extension history since 2008 is tracked separately.

Bill Text and Primary Sources

Drafted from primary source documents by LegislationPatch's automated research pipeline, then reviewed, verified, and edited by , Editor. Every figure and citation is checked against the official text before publication. See our editorial standards and AI disclosure.