The United States Senate Armed Services Committee has completed its revised version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and unlike the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives last month, it doesn’t contain any language that would ban DJI drones.
The House of Representatives bundled the Countering CCP Drones Act authored by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) into the 2025 NDAA, which narrowly passed the house by a margin of 217 to 199 in June. If the bill had been accepted without changes by the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, it would have then moved toward a floor vote. However, this was unlikely as the Senate almost always makes adjustments to bills it receives from the House. That did happen and the marked-up version of the bill the Senate committee approved doesn’t include the DJI drone ban.
“As the SASC meets behind closed doors, it’s hard to know exactly why the provision against DJI in the House version was left out of the Senate markup. There has been a lot of engagement in recent weeks from people who rely on our products for their businesses, their livelihoods, to save lives [firefighters and other emergency services], to spray their crops, and you certainly would hope that that has an impact on the thinking. But we don’t know,” Adam Welsh, head of global policy at DJI, tells AgFunderNews.
According to DroneDJ, over 6,000 public safety agencies, police, and fire departments submitted comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee urging it to oppose the inclusion of the Countering CCP Drones Act.
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee will now take their version of the bill into a conference with House committee representatives to come to a final bill both arms of Congress agree on.
“If it [the provision vs DJI] had been in the Senate version, there’s a very good likelihood that it would have made it into the final bill,” Welsh continues. “Because it’s not, they will have to debate the differences and try to figure out what the best options are. All we can do is keep engaging with people and reaffirm that there’s no data security issue with our product, that we’ve been vetted repeatedly, and that if they effectively ban DJI it’s going to not just hurt DJI but a number of different verticals including agriculture.”
DJI’s public messaging in the past few months indicates the company believed it was very possible its drones would be banned in the United States, so the news that the Senate did not include the ban in its version of the bill is a win. That said, the debate isn’t over. It is possible that adding the DJI drone ban back could be a bargaining chip the Senate is willing to concede in exchange for keeping other aspects of the bill that were altered.
“The August recess is coming up where senators and representatives will be back in their districts, so that’s a perfect opportunity for people to try to engage with lawmakers and explain why DJI drones are so important to their businesses,” Welsh says.
“We definitely don’t want to take our foot off the gas, so we’re trying to meet with as many people we can on the Hill to go through what we do on data security, and we’re also encouraging our customers to stay engaged and keep up the pressure.”
If the Countering CCP Drones Act were to be added back and passed, DJI’s FCC authorizations could be revoked and US-based operators would no longer be able to access new drones and their existing fleets may need to be grounded. Given DJI’s dominance in the drone space, it would effectively bring a vast majority of drone operations in the United States to a halt.