Lauren's Blog: In the War Between the Federal Government and States
Against Drone Maker DJI, Americans Are at Risk
https://lauren.vortex.com/2025/08/05/government-dji-drones-ban-risks
There is currently what amounts to a "war" between the U.S. federal
and state governments against specific Chinese drone makers, with the
big target being DJI. And a major issue has been what would happen if
the many organizations -- law enforcement, search and rescue, other
public safety, farmers, utilities, on and on -- couldn't continue to
obtain or use the DJI drones in particular that they have depended on
for years.
And the discussion has been largely theoretical for most of this
period because DJI drones, repairs, parts, and service have continued
to be available. But now that's changing and moving beyond the
theoretical and into real world effects, and yeah the situation is
deteriorating even faster than even most pessimistic observers
anticipated.
I'm not going to try review here all the deep details of how we got to
this point, except to note that there are multiple aspects. Confusion
over rapidly changing tariff rates is one factor. There have been
claims that DJI drones have, or maybe in the future could have
security issues, though this has never been demonstrated -- apparently
DJI has passed every security audit conducted on their products.
Many observers have long suspected that what's really going on is
politically-motivated protectionism from politicians in both parties,
because the organizations that buy DJI drones apparently consider them
to be more affordable, reliable, and rapid to obtain compared with
currently available U.S. made alternatives. And remember we're not
talking just about little DJI drones you can hold on your hand, they
also have very large drones that farmers use to spray crops, and big
drones that can lower or gather heavy payloads in rescue situations in
isolated, rugged areas and so on.
But now, with this confluence of factors, including U.S. Customs
reportedly pretty much choking off the supply of DJI products into the
U.S., we've reached a point where the rest of the world can buy these
advanced DJI drones, including new ones just recently released and
others likely to be very soon released, but the U.S. is cut off. The
supply of DJI products has dried up in the U.S. Out of stock virtually
everywhere. Repairs are reportedly taking longer, and parts are
difficult or impossible to obtain.
DJI is still trying to get a government agency to do the security
review mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act as passed by
Congress, and the deadline that would trigger an associated DJI drone
ban is at the end of this year. The whole situation is completely
nuts.
In Florida, the state government ordered official usage of DJI drones
stopped. That means grounding 200 million taxpayer dollars of drones
used for police work, fire fighting, mosquito control and more. And
the state is apparently only willing to provide a tenth of that much
to replace them with U.S. made drones that are typically many times
more expensive than DJI drones, and sometimes take months rather than
days to obtain.
In some states 90% of public safety drones are DJI. Their drones are
known to be exceptionally reliable. An Orlando police department
indicated that they had five failures of "approved" U.S. made drones
over a year and half, but no failures among the DJI drones they'd been
using.
We could keep going through the statistics and more of these cases but
you get the idea. We all want a strong domestic drone industry, but
agencies and other groups who rely on DJI drones in the U.S. are being
cut off from vital technology that the rest of the world can still
easily obtain. There haven't been publicly demonstrated security
problems with DJI drones despite the alarmist hype from the
politicians.
This entire mess does appear to be politically driven and BOTH parties
are to blame. These politicians need to stop this craziness, because
they're not just putting important U.S. businesses and other
organizations at risk with this drone ban nonsense, they'll be putting
U.S. lives at risk as well. That's irresponsible and it really needs
to stop, RIGHT NOW!
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
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Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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