15 FISA privacy votes, then $13.8M for police surveillance

Short answer: Congress's FY2026 spending bills carry $52.8M in earmarks for local police surveillance: 32 real-time crime centers, 18 public camera networks, 6 license plate reader projects, plus a drone, a gunshot detector, a biometrics buy and an "advanced AI" project. We joined every House requestor to the 2024 FISA warrant vote. 15 of them voted to make the FBI get a warrant before searching Americans' data, then asked for $13.8M of local surveillance tech that needs no warrant at all.

TL;DR: We classified all 1,087 FY2026 police earmarks in the COPS Technology and Byrne accounts and found 60 public-surveillance projects worth $52.8M, 45 House requestors behind 50 of the requests. 15 of those members voted Aye on the Biggs warrant amendment (roll 114, April 12 2024, failed 212-212), and 8 of the 15 also voted against reauthorizing Section 702 at all. In June 2026 the same requestors split on the 702 extension purely by party: 30 Democrats Nay, 13 Republicans Yea, zero crossovers, while the camera money stayed bipartisan.

Key numbers

What	Number	Source, checked Oct 28 2026
FY2026 public-surveillance police earmarks	60 projects, $52.8M	NTUF earmark table
Real-time crime centers	32 projects, $33.3M	NTUF, our classification
House members requesting them	45 (32 D, 13 R)	NTUF
Requestors who voted for the FISA warrant amendment	15, asking for $13.8M	House Clerk roll 114
Warrant Aye AND RISAA No	8, asking for $6.4M	House Clerk roll 119
Requestors who voted against the warrant	27, asking for $25.1M	House Clerk roll 114
2026 H.R. 9238 vote among requestors	D 30 Nay / 0 Yea, R 13 Yea / 0 Nay	House Clerk roll 221

The surveillance boom is being bought one earmark at a time

Earmarks (Congress calls them Community Project Funding) let a member name a project and a dollar amount inside a spending bill. Nobody adds them up by what they buy. We did.

Out of 1,087 police earmarks worth $939.4M in the FY2026 Commerce-Justice-Science bill, we pulled every project whose name says real-time crime center, camera, CCTV, license plate reader, drone, gunshot detection, biometrics or AI. Body cams and in-car cameras (18 projects, $11.5M) watch the police, not the public, so we left them out.

A real-time crime center is a room where police watch city cameras, plate-reader hits and gunshot alerts live, and stitch them into one feed. It is the backbone of the Flock-style plate network that has drawn privacy fights in town councils all year. Washington is now paying for the rooms directly.

The 15 who wanted a warrant for the feds

On April 12 2024 the House voted on Rep. Andy Biggs's amendment to require a warrant before the FBI searches Section 702 data for Americans. It failed on a 212-212 tie, the closest civil liberties vote in a decade. If you voted Aye, you told voters a government database search on a citizen should need a judge.

Fifteen of those Aye voters then put their names on FY2026 surveillance earmarks. The list is bipartisan: Republicans Mast (FL, $475K crime center), Maloy (UT, $1.13M "public safety technology and advanced AI"), Amodei (NV, $1.2M), Edwards (NC, $1.14M), McCormick (GA, $1.0M) and Joyce (PA, $298K cameras). Democrats Garcia (CA, $1.03M plate readers), Takano, Sherman, Matsui, Foushee, Correa, Scholten, Kamlager-Dove and Torres.

Eight of them (Foushee, R. Garcia, Joyce, Mast, Matsui, McCormick, Sherman and Takano) went further and voted against reauthorizing 702 at all on roll 119. Together they requested $6.4M for local systems that log where cars drive and who walks past which camera. No warrant is involved in either.

Follow the money: the warrant opponents asked for more

The bigger checks came from the other side of the vote. The 27 requestors who voted against the warrant asked for $25.1M, including the single largest House request: Jay Obernolte (R-CA), $3.0M for a police station "real-time crime/viewing center." Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who voted No on the warrant, requested $2.1M for a "Real Time Intelligence Center." Trent Kelly (R-MS) asked for $2.0M in in-car video and plate readers, and Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) $1.03M for plate readers across Kansas City and Independence.

That is at least consistent: they trust government data collection at every level. The 15 are the ones whose record says two different things depending on which badge holds the camera.

The 2026 vote tracked the White House, not privacy

On June 11 2026, H.R. 9238 to extend 702 failed 198-218 and the program lapsed. Among our surveillance-earmark requestors, the vote was a perfect party line: every Democrat who voted said Nay, every Republican said Yea. Democrats who backed 702 under Biden opposed it under Trump; several Republicans who wanted warrants in 2024 voted to extend it in 2026.

Meanwhile the local surveillance money got no party line at all. Our bet: privacy in Washington is a position about who runs the FBI this year. The cameras on your street corner are a ribbon-cutting, and nobody votes against a ribbon-cutting. We hold both parties to the same line: if a search needs a warrant when the feds run it, ask why it does not when your city does.

For more on who pays for this gear, see our pull on 252 DOJ grants that bought plate readers and how $564M in earmarks went to GOP underdogs. Every politics data piece lives at /articles/topic/politics/ and the daily feed at /news/.

How we built it (and where it undercounts)

• Source: the National Taxpayers Union Foundation's table of FY2026 enacted earmarks, COPS Technology and Byrne accounts.
• Classification is by project name only. Generic names like "technology upgrades" hide more cameras, so $52.8M is a floor. The table also misses some crime-center awards reported in local press.
• Votes come straight from House Clerk XML, matched by last name and state. Members seated in 2025 had no 2024 vote (8 rows).
• Shared projects (like Phoenix's crime center) credit the full amount to each requestor, so per-member sums can double count; project totals do not.
• A 702 warrant vote concerns federal searches of foreign-intelligence data. Local camera and plate systems run under a different legal regime. We are pointing at a principle, not alleging anything illegal.

What this means for you

Download the CSV below, find your representative and your city, and ask one question at the next town hall: "You voted for a warrant for the FBI. Will you require one before our crime center searches plate-reader logs?" Local councils set those retention and access rules, and they are winnable fights: you can push for a 30-day retention cap and a public audit log this year.

If you want to see the next grant land before the ribbon-cutting, Company Watch tracks any vendor or city's federal contracts, grants and lobbying for $99/mo, and we keep fixing it at no extra cost until it does what it promises.

Sources

• National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Tracking Congress's FY2026 earmarks, pulled Oct 27 2026
• House Clerk, Roll Call 114 (Biggs amendment to H.R. 7888), April 12 2024, checked Oct 28 2026
• House Clerk, Roll Call 119 (H.R. 7888 passage), April 12 2024, checked Oct 27 2026
• House Clerk, Roll Call 221 (H.R. 9238), June 11 2026, checked Oct 27 2026
• Tensorust, data.csv and surveillance_earmarks_fy2026.csv (our join), Oct 28 2026