Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over ‘Unqualified’ Spy-Chief Pick

A sweeping warrantless surveillance authority remains on track to expire Friday, with no clear path to a deal, after President Donald Trump refused this week to abandon his pick of housing official Bill Pulte to temporarily lead the US intelligence community—even tasking Pulte with gutting the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in a DOGE-style “downsizing“ before a permanent director is named.

In a Truth Social post after his second White House meeting in two days with House speaker Mike Johnson, Trump called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “very important to our military, and keeping the American people safe” and asked Congress for a short-term extension to give him time to find a permanent director of national intelligence.

Section 702 lets the government collect the communications of foreign targets abroad without a warrant, sweeping in an unknown volume of Americans’ messages that the FBI can later search. It faces a first-ever lapse in its legal authorization if Congress does not act by the end of Friday, June 12. Any renewal needs 60 votes in a Senate where Republicans hold 53 seats.

The director of national intelligence oversees the program, and Pulte’s appointment as acting DNI has become the major sticking point. Reauthorization had been on a workable path until Trump named him as Tulsi Gabbard’s replacement early last week. Senate leaders then could not muster enough votes to pass even a motion to begin debate on the program, with seven Republicans breaking from the party to join Democrats. The Republican holdouts want a warrant requirement to query Americans’ data, which the administration rejects; Democrats refuse to advance the bill while Pulte is in line for the job.

As head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte has sent the Justice Department criminal referrals alleging mortgage fraud by Trump critics including New York attorney general Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook—nearly identical allegations, which all have denied, against three of Trump's highest-profile critics. He has no intelligence background, despite a post-9/11 statute requiring the director to have “extensive national security expertise.” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and a coauthor of last week’s stalled bipartisan compromise, said someone with a history of weaponizing confidential information should not be handed the role.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has drawn a hard line over the appointment. Negotiations were “already in a very sensitive place,“ he told reporters Monday, when “Donald Trump, as he often does, tosses a hand grenade” by elevating Pulte. In a separate interview, Jeffries called Pulte “deeply unqualified” and “deeply dangerous,” with no national security, military, or law enforcement background and a demonstrated willingness to “weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries.”

Withdrawing the appointment, he said, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a deal: “That’s a starting point, not an ending point,” he said. “And then we can see if we can responsibly get to a place where there are enough reforms built into the law to provide guardrails and protect the American people.”

GOP leaders have pressed the White House for an off-ramp. Senate majority leader John Thune said the administration was “weighing seriously“ naming a permanent, Senate-confirmed director, while claiming the program is essential heading into the World Cup and the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations—framing the president echoed on Truth Social on Wednesday. Senator John Cornyn was more direct: “I’m still seeking any evidence of qualifications. And Democrats are not going to vote to pass 702 until he’s withdrawn.”

Cornyn said materials from Section 702 generate roughly 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief, a figure Senate Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley has also cited.

Some Republicans dispute the catastrophe framing. Representative Keith Self of Texas called the warnings “hysteria,” arguing that other FISA authorities remain in force and that proponents should accept reforms such as a warrant requirement: “FISA isn’t going dark. We have the law. We have precedent from 2008. Don’t fall for the scare tactics.” The libertarian Cato Institute has made a similar point.

“The [702] program has the FISA court’s permission to continue for another year, so it will continue whether we act or not,” said a senior Republican aide on a relevant committee. “None of the members saying the program is ending Friday will be claiming it’s actually dead on Monday—especially those on intel. They know better.”

Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, was sharper still. “If Republican leadership actually believed their baseless fearmongering about security at the World Cup, then they would do what needs to be done to get a deal to renew FISA by finally allowing votes on warrant requirements,” she said. “Any threats to national security during the World Cup fall squarely in the hands of Cotton, Grassley, and Trump officials who still refuse to allow votes on popular bipartisan reforms.” She added that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already ruled that 702 surveillance remains in effect until March 2027 under existing orders. This makes Johnson’s and Thune’s warnings about imminent national security consequences, in her view, a threat to civil liberties dressed up as urgency.

Even so, the Republican chairs of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees, Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley, respectively, have asked the administration to plan for a collection gap—including, if necessary, drafting an executive order to fill it.

Jake Laperruque, a surveillance policy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the standoff is a symptom of a deliberate process failure. “We don’t need to go through a sunset, and we don’t need to continue the same chaotic process of punting FISA with another short-term extension,” he said. “We can end the deadlock and resolve this issue now, but leadership needs to stop muzzling debate and allow a vote on warrants and reforms, like we’ve always had in the past. Blocking off reform votes is the reason we’re in this mess, and allowing votes on reforms is the only way out of it.”

The fight is unfolding as the government withholds two sets of records bearing on how Section 702 is used. In a June 3 letter to colleagues, Senator Ron Wyden wrote that warrantless searches sweeping in American politicians, activists, and journalists more than tripled in 2025 and that a still-secret FISA court opinion from March describes serious abuses. The administration has refused to declassify it, even after the Intelligence Committee’s leaders jointly asked for its release.

Separately, in a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by Cato, the FBI disclosed in a June 4 court filing that it had identified roughly 39,650 potentially responsive pages of Section 702 noncompliance records, but said it will not begin releasing them until mid-August.