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Elon Musk’s riskiest bet yet: Donald Trump

Published

2 years ago

October 18, 2024

Elon Musk’s riskiest bet yet: Donald Trump

Among the many audacious gambles that mark Elon Musk’s career, few have been bolder than the bet he is now placing on Donald Trump.

From satellites to electric vehicles, brain chips to AI-powered robots, Musk owns a series of businesses that depend heavily on contracts and rules set by the federal government.

Yet in an election that most political analysts believe to be a coin toss, the world’s richest man has tied his reputation and fortune to Trump’s latest quest for the White House.

Speaking earlier this month to Tucker Carlson, the firebrand former Fox TV host, Musk was only half-joking when he mused about Trump: “If he loses, I’m fucked.”

As the election enters its final stage, Musk’s embrace of the Trump campaign is becoming ever tighter.

It was revealed this week that Musk has donated at least $75mn to his pro-Trump group, America Pac, which has already spent over $118mn on efforts to support the campaign including ads, yard signs and a door-knocking operation.

When Trump held a rally two weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania — the site of the July assassination attempt on him — Musk was the surprise guest, bouncing on to the stage like an excited child.

Musk has used X, the social network he owns, to pump out pro-Trump content, including some of the most lurid conspiracy theories that have taken hold on the right.

Musk told a campaign event in the swing state of Pennsylvania this week that the biggest reason for backing Trump was the need for ‘sensible regulations’ © Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

View between the heads of spectators of Donald Trump as he speaks at a rally — Trump, who until recently was highly sceptical of electric vehicles, speaks at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania where Musk was his surprise guest © Jen Golbeck/SOPA Images/Reuters

On Thursday, Musk was back in Pennsylvania, the most important swing state in the election, to make the case for Trump to voters on his own. During the hour-long rally, he sported a gold Make America Great Again hat and gave some hints at the business rationale for his all-in support of Trump — a politician who until recently was highly sceptical of electric vehicles.

Musk said the biggest reason for backing Trump was the need for “sensible regulations”, claiming that “SpaceX can build a giant rocket faster than the licence can be processed by the government, which is insane.” He added: “If the current trend of strangulation by overregulation is not turned around, we won’t get to Mars.”

The owner of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and X has aspirations to shape the future of humanity — a Neuralink chip in the brain, a robot in the home, a driverless car to get to work, a rocket to colonise Mars. Musk’s bet appears to be that if Trump wins, he would gain substantial influence over how the government treats his companies.

The gamble would pay off if SpaceX and its Starlink satellites can earn more contracts from the US national security apparatus or if Tesla could win over Republicans sceptical of electric vehicles — and perhaps limit probes by regulators into the safety of its self-driving technology. And under Trump, X would be much less likely to clash with the administration over Musk’s absolute conception of “free speech”.

Trump has promised if elected that Musk would lead a “department of government efficiency”.

For Musk critics, the embrace of Trump is an extension of his long-running tussles with the public bodies whose decisions are central to the innovative industries in which Musk operates.

“Regulators have been a thorn in Tesla’s side for years,” says Dan O’Dowd, founder of a software company who is also a critic of Tesla’s efforts in driverless vehicles. “Musk believes that he is above the law.”

Musk and Trump used to be polar opposites in political terms. While the former president has often described climate change as a “hoax”, Musk used to boast that the mission of Tesla was “to help reduce risk of catastrophic climate change”.

The billionaire entrepreneur voted for Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in recent elections. Even in 2022, he was of the view that it was “time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”.

But during the past few months, Musk has not only become Trump’s most influential supporter, but has also embraced some of his most explosive rhetoric — including the claim that vice-president Kamala Harris would make the US a one-party state by turning illegal immigrants into Democrats. “If Trump doesn’t win, this is the last election,” Musk said on Thursday.

Musk’s shift began during the pandemic. He chose to get the Covid-19 jab but was a sceptic of government vaccine requirements for federal employees and contractors. Musk also became increasingly opposed to “woke” culture on the left and had a public argument with his transgender daughter.

Elon Musk gives a small bow of the head as Donald Trump congratulates him after the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft — Musk acknowledges Trump’s congratulations after the launch of a SpaceX rocket and crewed spacecraft in 2020. Musk voted for Joe Biden in that year’s US elections © Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Trevor Traina, a Trump donor who served as the ex-president’s US ambassador to Austria, suggests Musk is participating directly in politics for personal rather than commercial reasons. “As the world’s richest man, there is nothing Elon needs. He is just getting involved,” Traina says.

Musk has also had fights with the Biden administration. During Biden’s first year in office, the Tesla CEO, who has a long history of opposition to trade unions, felt snubbed when he was not invited to a White House event featuring US electric-vehicle manufacturers and the United Auto Workers union.

At the event, Biden praised Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors — which sells fewer than a fifth as many EVs as Tesla — telling her, “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious. You led, and it matters.”

“He’s never forgotten it,” says a former senior Tesla executive.

For Tesla, the risk of Musk’s election intervention is that it alienates the company’s natural customers. Only 13 per cent of Republicans say they are likely to seriously consider buying an electric vehicle, according to Pew Research, compared with 45 per cent of Democrats.

Trump himself has not been an ally of Tesla’s; he began a sentence this week on Fox saying, “The problem with electric vehicles” before cutting himself off, noting that “Elon Musk is a very good friend of mine.”

“It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. I suppose if Trump wins, he looks like a genius. If Trump loses, it doesn’t look so clever,” says Andrew Palmer, former chief executive of Aston Martin. “Whilst I think most people admire what he does, I think there is a risk that it would stimulate people to look for alternatives to Tesla.”

However some of Musk’s Silicon Valley rivals speculate that his goals around Tesla are longer term.

They say that Musk is aware that Tesla’s core business is increasingly under threat from cheaper Chinese EVs and rapidly advancing battery technology. The company has not released a new mass market product since the Model Y in 2020 and it remains unclear when a planned more affordable $25,000 vehicle will be launched.

Instead of releasing new cars — sales of which still account for four-fifths of Tesla’s revenue — Musk has pivoted the company to autonomous driving, robotaxis and AI-powered humanoid robots called Optimus.

A Tesla Optimus Robot in a glass case — Tesla’s Optimus robot at the Paris Auto Show this week. Musk’s aspirations to shape the future of humanity include a robot in the home © Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Aerial View of Tesla’s robotaxi — A golden cybercab wowed Musk’s fans at the ‘We, Robot’ event in Los Angeles earlier this month, but scant details underwhelmed investors © Tesla/Handout/Reuters

The billionaire laid out his sci-fi vision of the future at a splashy “We, Robot” launch at a film studio lot in Los Angeles last week. The dancing robots and golden cybercab wowed his fans, but scant details underwhelmed investors. The stock fell 9 per cent.

Using standard industry valuation multiples, Drew Dickson, founder of Albert Bridge Capital, estimates that Tesla’s auto business may be worth between $70bn and $100bn. By his calculations, that means the remaining $650bn of its market value — and as much as $90bn of Musk’s personal wealth — is largely based on investor optimism about its as-yet unproven technologies, all of which face significant regulatory hurdles before coming to market.

“The entire presentation was done on a movie set, so it was tough for observers to know what was real or not,” says Dickson, who has a short position in Tesla. “One thing Elon is extremely good at: distracting people from an underlying business that has a lot of questions.”

If Trump wins, Musk might hope that Tesla gets a more sympathetic hearing from the federal government. At the moment, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are all investigating Tesla’s claims about its driver-assistance systems.

NHTSA said on Friday that it has opened a new probe into Tesla after a vehicle with its “full self-driving” technology fatally struck a pedestrian.

Musk promised attendees that self-driving vehicles would be available in Texas and California from next year and robocabs on the road by 2027, but both would require Tesla to secure at least the so-called “Level 4, High Automation” classification and permits from state regulators at a pace far faster than any rivals have achieved.

The process took Google’s Waymo years and required its taxis to be equipped with a wider array of expensive sensors, including lidar laser-based object detection. Tesla’s full self-driving technology relies solely on cameras and is currently ranked as advanced level 2, which means drivers have to keep their hands on the wheel.

“I tend to be a little optimistic with timeframes,” Musk admitted at the event.

Among the Musk companies, SpaceX could benefit most from a close relationship with a US president. Analysts at Morgan Stanley forecast that the company’s revenues could triple to $63bn by 2030, driven to a large degree by Starlink, the satellite internet business which operates a network of 6,000 low-orbit satellites. SpaceX has already surpassed 100 launches this year.

In 2014, SpaceX sued the US Air Force to get into the launch business and has since become Nasa’s indispensable partner in supplying, and soon retiring, the International Space Station and getting astronauts to the moon.

$63bnSome forecasts for SpaceX revenues in 2030, triple what they are now

Although SpaceX has won multibillion-dollar contracts under Biden, it has also sparred with a multitude of federal and state authorities that Musk accuses of stifling innovation with red tape and rules.

Those include the Federal Aviation Administration, National Labor Relations Board and US Fish and Wildlife Service over alleged permitting, labour and environmental violations. Musk has called on the FAA chief to resign, sued the NLRB and mocked regulators claiming he needs a fish licence to launch a rocket.

Musk has also clashed with the Federal Communications Commission. The company needs FCC approval to lower the orbit of its Gen2 satellites even further and ultimately wants to increase their number to 29,988 from the currently permitted 7,500. Musk sharply criticised the FCC for revoking in 2022 a near-$900mn Starlink deal to provide rural broadband after questioning its promises on speed and reliability.

As Musk has intensified his support for Trump, Harris has in turn gone on the attack against the billionaire, using his name in her fundraising pleas.

Her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, told a rally with Michigan union workers that Republicans only care “about their billionaire friends like Elon Musk”.

“This is the guy that wants to be our economic tsar,” asked Walz. “The guy who wants to fire workers and bust unions? A guy who wants to take auto manufacturing to Mexico and source it with Chinese-made parts? You talk to your neighbours and friends and tell me if anybody in Michigan thinks that’s a good idea.”

Onlookers watch from nearby sand dunes as SpaceX’s Starship rocket is prepared for a test launch — Onlookers watch as SpaceX’s Starship rocket is prepared for a test launch in Texas earlier this month. California has blocked the company from increasing the number of its launches there © Eric Gay/AP

A dispute with the California coastal commission last week hinted at how Musk might respond to a Trump loss: by claiming political motives for any decisions that go against his companies.

The California panel voted to deny a request from the US Space Force to increase the number of launches in the state using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets. One member of the panel also criticised Musk for “hopping about the country spewing . . . political falsehoods” while clamouring for more lucrative government contracts.

In response, SpaceX is suing the regulator and accused it of seeking to “punish a company for the political views and statements of its largest shareholder and CEO”.

Traina, the Trump donor, believes such battles would also continue in a second Trump term. Musk’s “first impulse” as the head of the government efficiency department “would be to eliminate the California Coastal Commission”. But he adds: “I doubt that is possible.”

Musk insists he is only acting out of concern for the country. “I’m politically active now,” he said at the rally on Thursday, “because I think the future of America and the future of civilisation is at stake.”

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Appeals court rules that Trump’s asylum ban at the border is illegal

Published

2 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

Appeals court rules that Trump’s asylum ban at the border is illegal

President Trump speaks during an event on health care affordability in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday in Washington.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

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WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Friday blocked President Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access at the southern border of the U.S., a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.

In June 2025, people stand in a long line outside the Los Angeles Federal Building.

The court opinion stems from action taken by Trump on Inauguration Day 2025, when he declared that the situation at the southern border constituted an invasion of America and that he was “suspending the physical entry” of migrants and their ability to seek asylum until he decides it is over.

The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making,” allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.

Distraught girls cling to their father, Luis, as ICE detains him following an immigration hearing

“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden.

“We conclude that the INA’s text, structure, and history make clear that in supplying power to suspend entry by Presidential proclamation, Congress did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” the opinion said.

White House says asylum ban was within Trump’s powers

The administration can ask the full appeals court to reconsider the ruling or go to the Supreme Court.

The order doesn’t formally take effect until after the court considers any request to reconsider.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News, said she had not seen the ruling but called it “unsurprising,” blaming politically-motivated judges.

“They are not acting as true litigators of the law. They are looking at these cases from a political lens,” she said.

Leavitt said Trump was taking actions that are “completely within his powers as commander in chief.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Department of Justice would seek further review of the decision. “We are sure we will be vindicated,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

The Department of Homeland Security said it strongly disagreed with the ruling.

“President Trump’s top priority remains the screening and vetting of all aliens seeking to come, live, or work in the United States,” DHS said in a statement.

Advocates welcome the ruling

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that previous legal action had already paused the asylum ban, and the ruling won’t change much on the ground.

A drawing by one of the El Gamal children, who are currently in ICE detention.

The ruling, however, represents another legal defeat for a centerpiece policy of the president.

“This confirms that President Trump cannot on his own bar people from seeking asylum, that it is Congress that has mandated that asylum seekers have a right to apply for asylum and the President cannot simply invoke his authority to sustain,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

Advocates say the right to request asylum is enshrined in the country’s immigration law and say denying migrants that right puts people fleeing war or persecution in grave danger.

Lee Gelernt, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the case, said in a statement that the appellate ruling is “essential for those fleeing danger who have been denied even a hearing to present asylum claims under the Trump administration’s unlawful and inhumane executive order.”

Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the court decision as a victory for their clients.

“Today’s DC Circuit ruling affirms that capricious actions by the President cannot supplant the rule of law in the United States,” said Nicolas Palazzo, director of advocacy and legal Services at Las Americas.

Judge Justin Walker, a Trump nominee, wrote a partial dissent. He said the law gives immigrants protections against removal to countries where they would be persecuted, but the administration can issue broad denials of asylum applications.

Walker, however, agreed with the majority that the president cannot deport migrants to countries where they will be persecuted or strip them of mandatory procedures that protect against their removal.

Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was nominated by Democratic President Obama, also heard the case.

In the executive order, Trump argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents the authority to suspend entry of any group that they find “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The executive order also suspended the ability of migrants to ask for asylum.

Trump’s order was another blow to asylum access in the U.S., which was severely curtailed under the Biden administration, although under Biden some pathways for protections for a limited number of asylum seekers at the southern border continued.

Migrant advocate in Mexico expresses cautious hope

For Josue Martinez, a psychologist who works at a small migrant shelter in southern Mexico, the ruling marked a potential “light at the end of the tunnel” for many migrants who once hoped to seek asylum in the U.S. but ended up stuck in vulnerable conditions in Mexico.

“I hope there’s something more concrete, because we’ve heard this kind of news before: A district judge files an appeal, there’s a temporary hold, but it’s only temporary and then it’s over,” he said.

Meanwhile, migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries have struggled to make ends meet as they try to seek refuge in Mexico’s asylum system that’s all but collapsed under the weight of new strains and slashed international funds.

This week hundreds of migrants, mostly stranded migrants from Haiti, left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on foot to seek better living conditions elsewhere in Mexico.

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A New Worry for Republicans: Latino Catholics Offended by Trump

Published

11 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

A New Worry for Republicans: Latino Catholics Offended by Trump

When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.

Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.

The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.

On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.

“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”

Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.

If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.

In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.

The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.

“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”

“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.

Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.

The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.

Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”

JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.

“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.

Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.

When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.

“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”

Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.

“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”

Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.

“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.

Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.

“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”

Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.

“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”

Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.

“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.

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After 2 failed votes, Mike Johnson unveils new plan to extend key U.S. spy powers

Published

14 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

After 2 failed votes, Mike Johnson unveils new plan to extend key U.S. spy powers

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.

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Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.

The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.

FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.

For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.

Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.

“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and fellow Republicans celebrate GOP tax policies at an event outside the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, April 15, 2026.

Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.

“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”

“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”

A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.

“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.

But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.

NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”

“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.

FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.

Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.

“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”

The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.