Thank you, Josh. Thank you to Administrator Loeffler for this outstanding event today. This has been really fantastic to hear such an amazing lineup of speakers that you all have put together. The Commercial Drone Alliance is honored to be a part and sponsoring this event. Awesome group of stakeholders, and great to get to know so many, see so many friends, and meet some new faces here in this room that are all a critical part of the drone industrial base and the counter-drone industrial base. So, Chair Carr, let's kick it off.
Obviously, it was great having you a few months ago. We all kind of convened here in D.C. as well at the American Drone Leadership Summit, which we hosted back in July. We appreciated the opportunity to hear from you on these policies. Obviously, the FCC has been very busy. There's a lot going on, and you all have been very focused on the defense industrial base, the domestic drone industrial base in particular, and in promoting our industry. And so we appreciate your leadership. I think we've spent a lot of time here at this event today kind of hearing from some industry members as well as federal government folks at a high level. And I really want to take the opportunity with Chairman Carr now to kind of drill down about what this is looking like in practice through some of the actual policies that we've seen come through the FCC. So for those here in this room who might be unfamiliar, can you just talk a little bit about the FCC's role and kind of your focus and your agency's focus on both the drone industrial base and the kind of broader counter-drone market over the last year?
Yeah. Well, first of all, obviously, thank you so much for having me, and great to have a conversation with you all. And it's good to be here, particularly after lunch, so you guys can go into that food coma and just fall right asleep. I'll try to keep a nice, deep, steady voice to not disrupt the naps that you surely need to have at this point in the day. But it's a great event. Thanks so much to SBA for putting it on. I think the administrator, she's been doing just such a phenomenal job just across the board. This is just a great event. She's continued great work. All the other administration officials that you've had speaking here, and we are all fully, fully aligned. And the biggest vision, obviously, is American drone dominance. President Trump has made clear through a series of executive orders and other actions that he wants to unleash America's domestic drone manufacturers, and we are in a really good position to do that. I think more broadly, I think it's a sign of where President Trump is going as a general matter. We're taking actions really on sort of two different fronts at the same time. On the one hand, we're taking immediate action that is changing the trajectory of the economy. For instance, at the FCC, we're engaging in lots of immediate actions that are resulting in internet speeds being up, more competition for your broadband dollars. But President Trump, the administration, are also taking sort of these longer-term actions that are going to pay off down the road. And I think this drone issue set is one area where we're seeing again both of those. At the FCC, we've launched our own domestic drone dominance proceeding, and we're looking at a lot of things. One, obviously, we regulate access to spectrum, the airwaves that almost everything that doesn't have a wire needs to communicate, and drones are part of that. So we want to make sure that drones have the access to spectrum necessary that they can continue to flourish. We have a lot going on on that front, which we can get into more detail on. We also deal with jamming. So there are some federal prohibitions that restrict or regulate jamming technologies, and we've been taking aggressive actions to clear some of the red tape, some of the misunderstandings with respect to the law, to enable counter-drone technologies both in the real world but also in terms of being able to test it at test ranges. Historically, if you wanted time on a test range, it was a very long process. If you wanted to test a technology, you had to get very specific permissions from the government to test on this specific band at this exact period of time. Maybe that worked, you know, decades ago. But when you look at the pace of innovation and the cycle of change, you have to be able to rapidly innovate when you're out there on the test range. So we are updating our processes so you have much more blanket authorizations to test, whether it's drones as a general matter or counter-drones. We're also doing a lot on national security. We enforce something called the covered list, and that deals with a lot of different technologies, one of which is drones. We placed on the covered list at the end of last year all foreign-produced drones, and that has produced a really interesting reaction already. So since we put foreign-produced drones on the covered list, we've seen something like $6 billion newly flow into the domestic drone and related manufacturing businesses. I think in the first quarter of '26, there was almost $30 billion more broadly raised by drone companies, which was more than all of the money raised and invested for 2025. And so there's a lot to unpack there, but the bottom line is, you know, we are part and parcel of the administration's broad push to make sure that drones are enabled from spectrum to testing to counter-drones, and also that we are protecting our supply chain, which we can get more into some of the covered list stuff, which you probably care about, but it's actually a very interesting, sophisticated policy that protects us over the long term but deals with any potential near-term economic disruptions by allowing specific transition periods and waivers where there's hardships. And so it's a really smart policy, but maybe that's an area where we can sort of unpack further.
That sounds great. And by the way, there are a lot of investors here in this room, and so please do keep that money flowing into our industry. We appreciate all of that, and appreciate you all being here to learn more. So, okay, so you brought up three kind of separate work streams that you all are working through. Let's take those in opposite order. So first on the covered list, we have lots of small businesses here in this room. One thing that has really struck me, kind of even just being here today, is the kind of consensus in this room of kind of the problem set and the solution set and how do we get from here to there. So everyone, you know, we are all very committed, right? As Dr. Gorka said this morning, this is a race for the airspace, for, you know, what he exact—this is the 21st century airspace race, right? The next generation space race, airspace race, and this is a race that we must win, right? And so in order to get there, there's obviously the hardware, there's the tech stack, and we need to win in all of it, right? So the covered list is really focused on the hardware. And, you know, we heard from companies here today who are providing, producing those components. You can't build Rome in a day. We're all there. We're all putting money into this. We're all procuring, you know, working with component manufacturers, looking to onshore, actively onshoring, but the transition will take some time. So, and, you know, what kind of certainty can you give to folks here in this room, particularly the small businesses, who are navigating investments, who are navigating kind of the broader ecosystem, to understand that, you know, we have kind of the long game in mind here and that in the meantime, like, we understand that this isn't just going to be an overnight thing.
Yeah, that's great points in there, and I'll describe the covered list policy as a general matter. So when you start, there's no piece of electronics that you can use in the U.S. that doesn't go through the FCC's equipment authorization process. If you, you know, flipped over a remote or a baby monitor, you probably see an FCC logo on the back end of that. Now, historically, that process was very much about what spectrum band you want, what power level you want. It's very technical. But increasingly, obviously, there's a lot of national security checks that are getting added to that process. What the covered list does, and again, this is where the policy is really, I think, very sort of subtle but powerful. If you get onto the covered list, you can only get on there by a determination from a qualifying national security agency. The FCC itself doesn't make decisions about what goes on the covered list. National security agencies do, whether it's NSC or others. We then implement it. So they have a whole process that they run. They make the decision. Now, if you get on the covered list, again, I'll use drones since this is a drone event as the example. Foreign-produced drones were added to the covered list. Now, that doesn't have an immediate impact on what you can manufacture, what you can buy, or what consumers can continue to use. All it says is that if you are going to get a new model of a particular device, then it's impacted by the covered list. But if you have a drone today that's produced abroad, you can continue to have it produced abroad, manufactured abroad, you can import it, you can sell it. But if there's a new model that you want down the road, that's when the covered list takes into effect. Also, though, we have waiver processes along the way. And my understanding is that we haven't gone any more than I think 30 days or so to reach a final decision on waiver requests. So if you're saying, you know, yeah, we want to onshore for this next generation model, but this one component part, we're working really hard. It's not going to be, you know, six months. Can we get a waiver? The DoD and DOW, which are in charge of the waivers, have in fact been issuing them. There's also Buy America standards where more than 65% of it is made here that also clear. So it sends a clear immediate signal to the market that you're going to have to onshore, but at the same time it allows a very subtle transition period. Now we do also have a process for what we call sort of removing the grandfathering. So again, once you're on the covered list, a model from this year can continue to be manufactured and bought, but we're looking now at revoking some of the grandfathering in particular circumstances. So we're proceeding, for instance, looking at drones capable of engaging in swarming conduct to remove the grandfathering. So foreign-produced drones that can engage in swarming conduct, we're seeking comment on whether we should stop the continued importation and sale of even current models of that. Again, we're not looking at taking out of consumers' hands, but the further importation and sale. Similarly, we're looking at drones that are agricultural drones, the bigger drones that are capable of dispersing aerosol products. Those are included in some of our questions about do we remove the grandfathering. Again, we can do it in lots of different ways. We can do it on different timelines, but in broad brushstrokes, that's what we're doing. And as again as I indicated, it's good from a national security perspective, but we obviously still need these products in our supply chain. So it encourages the onshoring, the reindustrialization. So that's a real knock-on benefit. I was in Pontiac, Michigan, visiting a company, a domestic company called Swarm, and they do both light show drones but also related drones that can be used for other purposes. And they're building, they're expanding. I saw a demonstration in Pontiac, Michigan, of their technology, motors, and there's a lot of interest in that. There's a company in Florida that's, you know, manufacturing for the first time at some sort of scale drone motors. So it's a policy that's working. We'll work with you. We'll work through the hiccups. We'll work through the transition period. But I think it's important to send a signal to the market, to investors. You know, drones and similarly robotics is a similar proceeding. We're not going to be dependent on foreign adversaries for something that's going to be so critical going forward.
Absolutely. And so you mentioned kind of there's an active docket right now, and I know there's only so much you can say about particular rulemakings, right? There's one...
No limits on me. I can say anything. There's limits on what other people sometimes, but I can say whatever.
Okay, great. So let's dive in.
Okay. So there's one about the kind of equipment authorization process, and then there's the second, which you just mentioned, the military grade, right? Of kind of describing what the—I guess how you described it was like kind of a retroactive ban now on certain types of technologies. And certainly many folks in this room likely submitted comments to the docket. Just to kind of highlight at a high level, I think everyone—well, not everyone, but certainly folks here in this room—are generally very supportive of the goals of these rulemakings. I think at a high level, like some of the themes that we saw in the comments were around transition timelines, which we've talked about. Also, friend-shoring, right? So you talked about, you know, we need to make sure to get adversary countries out of the supply chain. I think there's general agreement there. How are you thinking, though, about kind of friend-shoring versus adversary nations?
Well, so far the policy, the way we've implemented it, is you come in very broad with a prohibition on all foreign-produced. We did that with drones, we've done that with advanced robotics, we've done that with power inverters. And then through the waiver and the exception process, you will see over time a narrowing, and I think you'll get some more clarity along the lines that you're suggesting as you see the types of exceptions that are provided through this conditional approval or waiver process.
Okay. The other rulemaking that is right now on the docket is kind of about the equipment authorization process. For some folks, it's a little kind of in the weeds in terms of the TCB process and certain FCC processes to get equipment authorizations. And this was not just about drones, right? Drones was just kind of one of many technologies that this could impact. And some of the themes that we saw in some of those comments were just—we all understand the goals absolutely of what you're trying to do here. And it's kind of a timeless question for you, right, of how do you enable innovation while also balancing that with security needs and just ensure that things are kind of scoped appropriately, right? And so there was, I'm sure, lots of different ideas that were thrown out. But I guess I'll ask you kind of the higher-level question of just how do you think about—we want to, you know, I think from our perspective, we just want to make sure that there's minimal, you know, impact on American drone manufacturers who are trying to do the right thing, while recognizing that there are absolutely certain situations where it makes sense to put those types of requirements in place. So how do you balance that innovation with security, which is of course a timeless question that the FCC is always asking itself, but in this particular case?
I think the specifics and getting specific information and arguments from companies is what makes the difference here. I mean, obviously, I understand instinctively change is hard for people, for businesses, for supply chains, and so there's going to be an instinctive resistance to onshoring, even friend-shoring type of conduct. In broad brushstroke arguments about, well, it's going to be expensive, it's going to be difficult, it's going to take time. It's like, all right, get through that, get through that. But like, what is the specific technology? You know, where can it be moved? Can it be moved in six months? Can it be moved in a year? If you're honest and upfront with us, you know, we're going to work in good faith. Again, I don't think it's a complete black box. I do think we're providing pretty quick reaction times and pretty quick advice back to people, but you've got to just drill down and be honest about the specifics of the drone, the specifics of the router when you're in that type of business. And you're going to get clarity, but just the general argument of it's expensive and it takes time—you got to get more specific than that when they're ultimately making their lobbying and their requests.
Yeah, absolutely. And obviously for our industry, one of the things that's somewhat unique is that we're also working very closely with the FAA, and you don't want to sacrifice safety, right? These are flying—we talked about comparing these to cell phones this morning, but they're flying cell phones. They're flying over people in urban areas, that kind of thing. So there's also all kinds of consideration around the quality and to ensure that we're not sacrificing safety in any way, which I know that companies are also very focused on, having worked with the FAA for many years. But so that all makes sense. To pivot, you also mentioned the counter-drone actions that you all have taken, which I think have been broadly welcomed by the community, and thank you for your leadership here. Congress enacted the Safer Skies Act, which was signed by the president. Obviously, we heard from Dr. Gorka this morning. There's drone dominance. There's also restoring aerospace sovereignty, the kind of drone security side of the coin—two sides of the same coin—which is also a big priority for our industry and the administration. So you talked about some of the changes you made at test sites. You also kind of issued some rulings around that that enable the use and sale of equipment in the context of Safer Skies, and would love to just kind of give you the floor to talk a little bit more about what you all are doing in that space.
Yes. Specifically for the FCC, there's a provision of law called Section 333. And in a nutshell, it basically says no person can drone a drone, no person can jam authorized communications. And historically, that provision has been misread or overread by outside parties. For one, it doesn't apply to the federal government because the federal government is not a person for purposes of the Communications Act. That's long been understood. So if you're a federal government entity, you can jam whether it's drones or frankly any other technology, cell phones, without running afoul of 333. Now you may need other sources of authority to do the act, and that may be present or not present, but Section 333 is no restraint on the federal government engaging in jamming activities, and we've recently issued a declaratory ruling to clarify that. Similarly, to your point, the Safer Skies Act provided some additional authorities to jam and engage in counter-drone technologies. And we've provided again declaratory rulings to update that you can act pursuant to Safer Skies permissions without running afoul of Section 333. And we issued that advice right in the run-up to July 4th and some of the FIFA World Cup games, and people were able to use and take advantage of that so that not just the federal government but state, local, tribal law enforcement authorities could fall under that same type of protection without running afoul of 333.
Yeah. And the FIFA World Cup was such an example of both sides of the coin really working so well together, right? You had—I'll use Kansas City as an example. So you had lots of drones being used for public safety while at the same time, as you know, mitigations that were necessary to ensure that the stadium and the surrounding areas remain safe. So we do expect to see a lot more of that, and FCC, you play a really important role here, and really appreciate your leadership. One question that I've heard—I know that the policies around Safer Skies, I believe they kind of technically were through the end of the year. Is there a plan to extend those?
