An effort in state legislatures across the country to pull the plug – literally – on the National Security Agency has ended in failure, with mass surveillance opponents lamenting over spineless colleagues and the national group behind the push looking to support more bite-size reforms.

The almost completely abandoned effort aimed to deny water and electricity to the spy agency following Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures about the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records and Internet surveillance programs.

Through legislation, state politicians sought to ban state and local governments from providing “material support” to the NSA, including services from public utilities. Bills in Maryland, home to the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters, and Utah, location of a massive NSA data storage facility, threatened water deals with local governments that are essential to agency operations.

The ambitious legislative campaign attracted wide media coverage, but failed to achieve victory.

Former Maryland Del. Michael Smigiel, the Republican sponsor of his state’s legislation, recalls five of his seven cosponsors promptly jumping ship in 2014. “I just found out the NSA is in my district,” he recalls one of the men telling him.

In Utah, Rep. Marc Roberts, also a Republican sponsor, says he won't reintroduce the bill this year, concluding its failure “means people would rather give up their liberty for a little bit of security” and that there’s broad skepticism about states' power to curb NSA operations.

Bills in other states – including Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Washington – also have failed. A bill in California passed, but after being made toothless.

The bills generally said states and their political subdivisions cannot supply material support to federal agencies that collect citizens’ metadata without individualized warrants, and often included a ban on using evidence gathered in such a way in state courts.

Mike Maharrey, a spokesman for the Tenth Amendment Center, which crafted the model legislation used by state legislators, says the center has turned its focus toward enlisting support for privacy reforms that “aren’t quite as aggressive” but still can have a “big impact up the chain.”

Last year, there were more than a dozen material support-banning bills, he says. Now, he knows of just one, in Michigan, and he isn’t particularly optimistic about its chances.

“There’s a great deal of willingness and openness and eagerness about taking action at the state level,” Maharrey says. “There obviously is an appetite for this, but we have come to realize just how powerful the law enforcement and, in the case of the NSA, the military lobby is.”

Maharrey’s group now is promoting draft legislation from the American Civil Liberties Union that would restrict the use of phone location-tracking Stingray devices, limit warrantless access to communications and establish state rules for drones and license plate readers. The ACLU announced last week its privacy legislation already had been introduced in 16 states.

“We’re still working to figure out how to bring enough pressure from the bottom on these institutions to make them bend,” Maharrey says. “We’ve definitely created a foundation for something we will continue into the future. We’re just looking at other ways to move the ball forward.”

Some sponsors of the more ambitious legislation, meanwhile, have looked to higher office. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, sponsored California’s successful yet weakened bill, and was elected to Congress shortly afterward. Smigiel, who lost a low-vote legislative primary, now is seeking to knock off U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., by running on a libertarian platform against the famously anti-marijuana lawmaker ahead of an April primary.

Smigiel says he’s getting support from pot reformers and supporters of autonomy for the District of Columbia, which a Harris budget amendment barred from regulating recreational marijuana sales despite 70 percent of district voters casting ballots for legalization. A poll Smigiel commissioned found him crushing Harris, though it also presented respondents with questions about Harris’ record.

If elected to Congress, Smigiel sees himself working with fellow libertarians such as Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Justin Amash, R-Mich., and likeminded Democrats to tackle NSA surveillance.

Though Congress passed and President Barack Obama last year signed the USA Freedom Act, ending the government's automatic bulk collection and storage of domestic U.S. call records, deeper reform, such as a ban on “backdoor” searches of Internet communications of Americans, remains stuck despite such an effort passing the House of Representatives twice.

Smigiel says he’s alarmed at the lack of action from elected officials, particularly given recent revelations that members of Congress were affected by the executive branch’s monitoring of Israel’s campaign against the recent Iran nuclear deal.