Legal to fly, hard to replace: the FCC drone listing and public-safety fleets

The week

On December 22, 2025, the Federal Communications Commission added uncrewed aircraft systems and their critical components produced in foreign countries to its Covered List. The step followed a national security determination by an interagency body, made under Section 1709 of the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which had singled out DJI and Autel Robotics for review. Being on the Covered List blocks new FCC equipment authorizations, which most radio-equipped products need before they can be marketed or imported in the United States. It did not by itself prohibit the continued use of models the FCC had already authorized. Many state and local police, fire, emergency management and public works agencies had built their drone programs on foreign-made aircraft, much of it from DJI.

Public-safety drone programs grew quickly over the past decade, many on inexpensive, capable foreign-made aircraft. The December action was easy to misread as a ban. It was narrower than that, and for budget holders more awkward. Existing aircraft stayed legal to fly, but the pipeline of new models closed. Earlier in this series we argued that the 2022 Covered List additions for telecom and video equipment made the hardware inventory a procurement control. Drones add something that cameras and routers mostly lack: short service lives, consumable parts and continuous software dependence. The exposure splits four ways, each with its own owner and timeline: the airframes in service, the spares that keep them flying, the software and data services behind them, and the replacement fleet.

The airframes in service

Aircraft already authorized could keep operating. That bought time, but not much. Public-safety drones crash, get lost over water and wear out from heavy use. A program that flew a dozen aircraft at the end of 2025 would not fly the same dozen in 2028.

The practical question is attrition, not legality. A program manager needs to know, for each airframe, its age, flight hours, mission and expected remaining life. From that comes a simple forecast: how many aircraft the program will have in each of the next three years if nothing new is bought. Many agencies found their drone records sat with individual units or pilots rather than in a fleet system. That made the forecast slow, and it made it harder to show a budget office the shape of the decline.

The forecast also forces a mission decision. Not every use needs the same aircraft. Search and rescue, fire overwatch and crash reconstruction may justify keeping the best remaining airframes in reserve for them. Routine inspection and training flights can shift to older aircraft, or to replacements first. Ranking missions this way lets a program protect the capability that matters most while the fleet shrinks. It also gives elected officials a concrete account of what would be lost if replacement funding slipped, which is more persuasive than a general warning.

Spares, batteries and repairs

Consumables decide how long the airframes last. Batteries degrade with charge cycles, propellers and gimbals break, and cameras fail. Whether a replacement part counted as a covered critical component, and whether new versions could be authorized, depended on details the FCC continued to work through after December.

Agencies that used the manufacturer’s repair service also had to ask whether it would continue at the same price and speed in the United States. Stockpiling is the obvious response, but batteries have limited shelf lives and stockpiles tie up money. A sensible middle course is a defined reserve of the highest-failure parts for the aircraft expected to stay in service longest, bought once and tracked. Cannibalizing grounded airframes for parts is a legitimate plan if it is deliberate and recorded.

Software, firmware and data services

Modern drones depend on firmware updates, flight apps, mapping tools and cloud services, many supplied by the aircraft maker. If a supplier’s U.S. business shrinks, update frequency and support quality can fall while the aircraft remain legal. That has security consequences. Unpatched flight software, and controller apps on agency phones, are risks in their own right, and some states had already restricted foreign-made drones in state agencies for that reason.

It also has data consequences. Agencies should know where flight logs, video and imagery are stored, who can reach them and how they would be exported if the vendor changed. Many programs run in local data mode or on agency-managed platforms for this reason. For footage used as evidence, chain of custody requirements do not change because the vendor did. The records retention schedule should cover drone footage explicitly, including footage held in a vendor cloud.

The replacement fleet

The fourth exposure is the one that needs money. U.S.-made and allied alternatives existed, and federal programs such as the Defense Department’s Blue UAS list had already steered some buyers toward vetted models. They generally cost more per aircraft and sometimes offered different capabilities, such as shorter flight times or different sensors.

That is a budget-cycle problem. Most state and local agencies set capital budgets a year or more ahead, and grant programs carry their own rules on eligible equipment. An agency that started replacement planning in January 2026 could fund aircraft in a later fiscal year. One that waited for its fleet to fail would face an unfunded gap, often at the moment a high-profile search or fire needed air support.

Cooperative purchasing helps. Statewide contracts and multi-agency buys can lower unit costs, standardize training and spares, and give smaller jurisdictions access to terms they could not negotiate alone. Procurement teams should also price the whole program: pilot retraining, docking stations, software subscriptions, data storage and the cost of running two fleets in parallel during a transition.

Elected officials and budget offices need a plain briefing. The program is not being shut down, but its cost base is changing. The decisions made in the next one or two budget cycles will determine whether coverage continues without a gap. Presented that way, replacement funding reads as asset management rather than an emergency request, and it competes on ordinary terms.

With hindsight

The FCC kept adjusting the action in the following months. In January 2026 it created temporary exemptions for drones and components on the Defense Department’s Blue UAS lists and for products meeting a Buy American origin standard. Those exemptions were set to expire at the start of 2027. Its engineering office also issued a waiver in January allowing certain software and firmware updates to previously authorized foreign-made drones. In May it extended that relief to at least January 2029, which eased the concern about unpatched fleets. DJI sought reconsideration at the FCC in January and challenged the action in the Ninth Circuit in February. The FCC also revoked certain DJI and Autel authorizations granted shortly before the listing, which made “legal to fly” less permanent than it first looked.

For agencies, the effect was gradual rather than sudden, as the structure of the rule implied. Programs that budgeted for replacement in 2026 now have a funded transition. Those that relied on existing aircraft lasting are facing attrition with fewer choices and higher unit prices.