The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, H.R. 4639, has a simple premise. Federal agencies cannot purchase, from commercial data brokers, information that would otherwise require a warrant, subpoena, or court order to obtain directly. If a statute or the Constitution requires a judge to sign off on government collection of a category of data, the government cannot avoid that requirement by routing the purchase through a private intermediary.

The bill has been introduced in three consecutive Congresses. It has passed the House twice on bipartisan margins. It has been stripped from conference reports twice. It was locked out of the current Section 702 reauthorization by a closed rule that blocked all amendments.

The proximate reason the data broker loophole remains open is that the bill that would close it has been procedurally killed three times in a row.

The 2024 House Passage

On April 17, 2024, H.R. 4639 passed the House by a vote of 219 to 199. The bill had 123 Republican yes votes and 96 Democratic yes votes — the kind of left-right coalition that forms only when civil libertarians on both sides align against the intelligence community and law enforcement lobbies. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), the lead sponsor, called the vote "a generational reassertion of the warrant requirement."

The Senate did not take up the bill as a standalone measure. Instead, the language was incorporated as an amendment to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), the Section 702 reauthorization vehicle. The RISAA conference report emerged without the data broker language. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mike Lee (R-UT) issued a joint statement noting that the provision had been "stripped behind closed doors." Neither senator identified the specific negotiators who had removed it. The RISAA passed with the data broker loophole intact.

That was the first kill.

The 2025 Reauthorization Cycle

In February 2025, Davidson reintroduced the bill as H.R. 1515 in the 119th Congress, with a broader coalition of co-sponsors than the prior version. The bill attracted 67 original co-sponsors within two weeks of introduction — a significant number for privacy legislation in the modern Congress.

As the 702 reauthorization cycle began in mid-2025, the bill was once again folded into the House vehicle as an amendment. In the House Rules Committee mark-up, the language survived. On the House floor, the underlying bill passed 226 to 198, with the data broker provision included.

The Senate version, drafted by the Intelligence Committee under a different structure, did not include the language. In the September 2025 conference committee, the data broker provision was removed. The final measure passed both chambers without it.

That was the second kill.

The procedural pattern is worth noting. In both 2024 and 2025, the data broker provision cleared the House with bipartisan support. In both years, it was removed during the conference process between the two chambers. The removals were not recorded in a public vote of the conference committee. Conference committees are not required to publicly record their deliberations. The removals were disclosed only through post-hoc statements by the provision's sponsors.

The 2026 Closed Rule

This month's reauthorization is the third kill.

The current 702 authority was slated to expire at midnight on April 19, 2026, unless extended. On April 16, the House Rules Committee met to set the parameters for floor consideration of a reauthorization bill. The Rules Committee, which is controlled by the majority leadership, chose a closed rule — meaning no amendments would be permitted on the floor.

Davidson had filed the data broker provision as an amendment in the Rules Committee. The Hill reported that the amendment had the votes to pass on the floor, drawing from the same bipartisan coalition that had delivered the 219-199 vote in 2024. The closed rule prevented that vote from happening.

When the underlying reauthorization bill reached the House floor, a separate bloc of Republicans — Reps. Chip Roy (TX-21), Ralph Norman (SC-5), and Morgan Griffith (VA-9) — held up the Rules Committee vote over a different amendment, one requiring warrants for U.S.-person queries of the 702 database. That hold-up collapsed the clean reauthorization process in the early morning hours of April 17. The House ultimately passed a 13-day short-term extension, which the Senate cleared by unanimous consent later the same day.

The 13-day extension contains no data broker restriction. It contains no warrant requirement. It extends the existing authority exactly as it stood, with all of its loopholes, for thirteen additional days.

The next statutory deadline is April 30. That is the date on which the 702 authority expires if no further action is taken. Unless the provision is restored in the next reauthorization vehicle — a prospect that requires it to survive both chamber markups and a conference committee — the data broker loophole enters its eleventh year of federal agency use.

Who Killed It: The Identifiable Votes

The three kills — 2024, 2025, and 2026 — have three different procedural mechanisms. The 2024 and 2025 conference-committee removals were conducted outside public view. The 2026 closed rule is partially on the record.

The Rules Committee vote on the closed rule was nine to four, along party lines. The nine Republicans voting to adopt the rule were: Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Morgan Griffith (R-VA), Erin Houchin (R-IN), Austin Scott (R-GA), Chip Roy (R-TX), Michelle Fischbach (R-MN), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), and the Rules Committee vice chair. (Roy voted for the rule despite objecting to the underlying bill; his strategy was to hold up the process through a different mechanism.)

Adopting a closed rule is a technical vote that does not typically carry the same political weight as a substantive vote. That is precisely the feature that makes it useful for procedural elimination of amendments that would otherwise pass. A member who votes for a closed rule preserves their ability to claim later that they "would have voted for" the amendment in question. Because no floor vote occurred, that claim is unfalsifiable.

On the conference-committee removals in 2024 and 2025, the public record is thinner. The 2024 conference report was produced by a small group of House and Senate negotiators whose identities were listed in the conference report but whose deliberations were not transcribed. The 2025 conference was run through a similar process.

Senator Wyden's office confirmed in a post-2025 statement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security had each lobbied against inclusion of the provision. The statement does not name the specific Senate conferees who responded to that lobbying. ODNI and DHS have standing practice of not commenting on internal legislative strategy. The FBI declined to respond to requests for comment on the 2025 conference process.

What the Agencies Are Defending

The agencies' substantive objection to the bill has been consistent. It is not that the commercial data pipeline is unimportant — it is that the pipeline is essential. The 2022 Office of the Director of National Intelligence report, declassified in 2024 under Senate pressure, stated that commercially available information had become a "critical resource" for intelligence analysis. The Department of Homeland Security, in its 2023 response to an Inspector General report, maintained that commercial data purchases were a lawful alternative to traditional collection methods and that restricting them would "severely degrade" operational capability.

The agencies' position is that the commercial data pipeline is too operationally important to be restricted. The bill's position is that operational importance is not a constitutional argument. What the Fourth Amendment requires, the Fourth Amendment requires, regardless of whether the agency finds it inconvenient.

These are the two sides. For a decade, the agencies' position has prevailed at every procedural juncture where the choice was forced.

The Texas Angle

The 2024 vote breakdown shows a specific pattern in the Texas delegation. Of the twenty-five Texas Republicans who voted on H.R. 4639, eight voted yes — Chip Roy, Michael Cloud, Wesley Hunt, Lance Gooden, Ronny Jackson, Keith Self, Beth Van Duyne, and Dan Crenshaw. Seventeen voted no. The Democratic delegation voted 10-3 in favor.

Roy and Self, who have since become co-chairs of the Sharia-Free America Caucus, both voted for the data broker restriction in 2024. Roy's subsequent 2026 posture — using the Rules Committee to block the underlying reauthorization over a different warrant amendment — is consistent with the civil-libertarian position he staked out then. Self's pattern is less clear; his public statements since 2024 have focused on different issues.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has not commented on the data broker provision in his public statements on the 702 reauthorization. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the 2024 and 2025 reauthorization cycles, has been a consistent opponent of the data broker restriction. His 2024 and 2025 statements emphasized operational capability. Neither senator has publicly addressed the closed-rule elimination of the provision in the current cycle.

Why It Matters

The data broker loophole is not a drafting error. It is not an oversight. It is a legislative outcome — the result of three procedural maneuvers that each produced the same result.

The constitutional question the Supreme Court addressed in Carpenter v. United States (2018) — whether the government may collect location histories without a warrant — was decided in the negative. That ruling is binding on federal and state law enforcement. The commercial data pipeline is the mechanism by which agencies have, in practice, preserved the functional equivalent of that collection authority for the last eight years.

A bill that would close that pipeline has passed the House twice. The Senate has been the point of failure each time — through conference-committee stripping in 2024 and 2025, and now through the closed rule that prevented a floor vote in 2026.

The next vehicle is the April 30 reauthorization. If the provision is to be restored, the coalition that delivered 219 votes in 2024 and 226 votes in 2025 has thirteen days to organize. The agencies that have successfully defeated it three times have thirteen days to defeat it a fourth time. The pattern so far favors the agencies.

What happens before April 30 is not a question of whether the Constitution protects the privacy of commercial data. That question has been answered. The question is whether Congress will make that protection operational, or whether the procedural mechanism that has neutralized three separate legislative attempts will neutralize a fourth.

The answer is thirteen days away.

La Verdad Tejana's companion explainer on how ICE uses commercially purchased cellphone location data to track Texas communities documents the on-the-ground impact of the same loophole. For the deeper procurement pattern, see Bastion's investigation of the federal agencies buying data the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for.