Hill sources tell The Daily Beast that they won't save a surveillance effort so abusive that the NSA shut it down.

Eighteen years after George W. Bush and the National Security Agency began secretly and warrantlessly collecting the phone records of every American, the House of Representatives is taking a major step to kill the vestige of one of the most controversial domestic surveillance programs in American history.

That step, The Daily Beast has learned, is: nothing.

In barely a month, a failed 2015 surveillance law called the USA FREEDOM Act will expire. USA FREEDOM set up a process to let the NSA obtain and query mass amounts of phone data—the phone numbers a surveillance target dialed and received, as well as all those that target was in touch with, and then all those they were in touch with—held by the telecommunications firms.