The congressional effort to rein in the government’s surveillance powers before a looming deadline on March 15 could run up against a new opponent: a new coronavirus. House Democrats have been working on plans to further amend a provision of the Patriot Act, which as of 2015 provides a way for the government to get American citizens’ phone records from telecom companies. This and other key provisions of the Patriot Act must be reauthorized by March 15, or the surveillance authority lapses. The Democrats’ amended bill would pull the provision’s authorization while allowing and tweaking other other ways the government collects records. But those negotiations have been thrown off track, with critics of the spying program alarmed by the possibility that congressional leaders may try to use the coronavirus outbreak — and the coinciding legislation to fund a response — as a vehicle to muscle through an unamended extension or reauthorization.

The Trump administration’s request for $2.5 billion to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic is likely to become an unstoppable legislative vehicle — as must-pass legislation that congressional leaders of both parties could use to ram through a reauthorization of the FBI’s call detail records program. Such a move would sidestep the House’s reform effort and instead push through a clean reauthorization of the program. The Senate, said a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is “threatening to put that clean reauthorization into something like coronavirus funding which would make it impossible to defeat if we don’t come up with a bill here. Pelosi and Schiff will never allow it to expire.” “I would say it is still chatter at this point. But it is also chatter that could become their Plan A,” a Senate Republican aide, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the matter, told The Intercept. Josh Withrow, senior policy analyst at the GOP-leaning libertarian organization Freedom Works, said that he has heard from a number of his sources on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle that the coronavirus vehicle is a looming threat. “It’s a real fear,” he said. “It obviously seems to have some legs, but I think they’d run into a little bit of a problem with that, because they already have a lot of conservatives questioning the dollar amount and saying, just pass a clean coronavirus.” The program in question is the “call detail records” program, which sets out how the FBI or NSA can obtain phone records stored by telecom providers. Prior to that, the NSA collected phone records in bulk, relying on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that a federal appeals court disputed in 2015. But due to widespread compliance issues and limited intelligence value, the NSA voluntarily shut down the call details records program in 2019, leading many in Congress to question why the Trump administration was seeking to extend the legal basis for a now-defunct program. Civil liberties groups now see the reauthorization fight as a bellwether for whether Congress can bring itself to roll back surveillance authorities even in cases where the intelligence community determines they have limited intelligence value. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee had been scheduled to meet to vote on the product of closed-door negotiations between Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, his counterpart on the intelligence committee Rep. Adam Schiff, Republicans, and the intelligence community.