Section 702 of FISA Expires After Two Stopgaps Fail, in a Senate Fight Reporting Ties to the Pulte Nomination Rather Than Surveillance Substance

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the authority underlying PRISM downstream collection — expired at midnight on Friday, June 12, 2026, after Congress failed to enact a full reauthorization.

The sequence. RISAA (April 2024, Pub. L. No. 118-49) had reauthorized Section 702 through April 2026 and expanded the “electronic communication service provider” definition to reach data centers and cloud storage. As the April 2026 deadline approached, Congress passed a ~10-day stopgap extension (~April 17, 2026), then a second ~45-day extension in late April. Neither produced a full renewal. Senate action stalled on June 5; Chairman Grassley urged passage from the floor on June 8, four days out; the House rejected a last-ditch extension on June 11; the authority lapsed the following day.

What reporting attributes the collapse to. Contemporaneous accounts tie the Senate stall to a fight over the Bill Pulte nomination rather than to disagreement over 702’s substance or its civil-liberties provisions. That is what reporting says about the cause; this entry records it as such and asserts no independent causal claim of its own.

Status as of 2026-08-31: still lapsed. No reauthorization was located between the June 12 lapse and the end of an early-to-mid-August search window. A dateline caution applies: Grassley’s Senate Judiciary release re-indexed on August 6, 2026 is a re-dated version of the June 8 floor speech, not a new statement — an RSS index date read as a remarks date would manufacture a false “still contested in August” picture.

What is NOT established here, and matters. No source fetched in full text addresses what operationally changed at the moment of lapse — the status of existing FISA Court-approved certifications, or whether PRISM collection stopped, continued under a wind-down, or was re-sourced to other authority. A statute expiring is not the same event as collection ceasing, and this entry documents only the first. Anyone citing this for the second needs a separate source.

Related: 2008-07-09–fisa-amendments-act-passed-telecom-immunity (the origin of the 702 authority), 1978-10-25–fisa-executive-power-statute-bargain.