TL;DR: Congress made the record-keeping on PRISM so onerous that the NSA said "fuck this shit we aren't getting enough intel out of it to justify the paperwork." Full WSJ text follows.

The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a surveillance program that collects information about U.S. phone calls and text messages, saying the logistical and legal burdens of keeping it outweigh its intelligence benefits, according to people familiar with the matter.

The recommendation against seeking the renewal of the once-secret spying program amounts to an about-face by the agency, which had long argued in public and to congressional overseers that the program was vital to the task of finding and disrupting terrorism plots against the U.S.

The latest view is rooted in a growing belief among senior intelligence officials that the spying program provides limited value to national security and has become a logistical headache.

Frustrations about legal-compliance issues forced the NSA to halt use of the program earlier this year, the people said. Its legal authority will expire in December unless Congress reauthorizes it.

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It is up to the White House, not the NSA, to decide whether to push for legislation to renew the phone-records program. The White House hasn’t yet reached a policy decision about the surveillance program, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The White House National Security Council and the NSA declined to comment.

The surveillance program began clandestinely—and, at first, without court approval—under the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The NSA operation has sought to collect the metadata of all domestic calls in the U.S. in order to hunt for links among potential associates of terrorism suspects. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation.

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of the program—along with a tranche of documents exposing other surveillance operations carried out by the NSA—to journalists nearly six years ago. The disclosures ignited an international uproar over the scope of America’s electronic-spying capabilities.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the NSA was considering ending the metadata program but that such conversations were in the early stages.

Following Mr. Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015, requiring the spy agency to replace its bulk-metadata program with a pared-down system under which call records are retained by telephone companies. But that new system has run into compliance issues and is now viewed by many within the intelligence community as more of a burden than a useful tool.

“The candle is not worth the flame,” one former senior intelligence official said about the phone-records program. Former officials also said the push to unplug the operation coincided with an NSA retooling that reflects a broader U.S. intelligence shift from counterterrorism to tracking the strategic intentions of adversarial nations, such as China and Russia.

Several former intelligence officials said there was skepticism within the NSA about the utility of the metadata-surveillance program even before the Snowden revelations. However, Mr. Snowden’s disclosures forced U.S. intelligence officials into a posture of having to defend it publicly.

The new system has been difficult to manage. For example, the NSA said last year it had purged hundreds of millions of records it had collected since 2015 because telecommunications firms had supplied records NSA hadn’t been authorized to obtain under the law.

There have been signs in recent weeks that the NSA is ready to drop the program. A national-security adviser for the Republican congressional leadership, Luke Murry, said in a March podcast interview with the Lawfare security blog that the NSA hadn’t used the program in the six months prior.

“They tried to set up this compromise program, and it appears it just didn’t really work,” said David Kris, former head of the Justice Department’s national-security division and founder of Culper Partners LLC, a consulting firm. “Some compromises are good for both sides of the debate, and some are good for neither.”

Support for the phone-records program also appears to be receding in Congress. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Journal that he doesn’t currently believe it should be renewed.

“At this point I think it’s going to be a pretty tough argument for them to make,” Mr. Warner said. “I’ll listen to whatever case they want to present, but I’m not convinced at this point that the advantages of the program have been worth the trouble.”

Last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation to end the NSA’s domestic metadata program, saying it has never stopped a terrorist attack and continues to run afoul of civil liberties.

Other influential lawmakers, however, say they remain committed to the program.

“It’s the intent of the committee to fully reauthorize 215,” Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a recent interview, referring to the section of the Patriot Act statute that enables the program. “If we have technical problems or challenges that NSA has to take into account, that’s OK…It’s not something we easily shelve.”

In remarks over the past month, Gen. Paul Nakasone, the director of the NSA and chief of U.S. Cyber Command, has declined to offer specifics about the status of conversations about the metadata program, but he has acknowledged officials are reviewing whether it is necessary.

“It’s a collaborative process, and the administration will make the decision,” Mr. Nakasone said this month at a Marshall Forum event in Washington. “We are taking a look at it, what is the value of it, what are we able to get from it…I think the question becomes, is this a tool that we continue to need to have for our nation’s security?”