FCC Opens Public Comment on Spectrum and Licensing Reforms to Advance U.S. Drone Industry

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released Public Notice DA 26-314 on April 1, 2026, asking the drone industry, investors, and defense stakeholders what the agency needs to fix to help the United States lead the global drone race. Comments are due May 1; reply comments by May 18. The notice, formally titled “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” was issued jointly by the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB) and Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), and is available via MeriTalk. This is the most consequential FCC drone proceeding since the agency added all foreign-made UAS to its Covered List in December 2025.

What the FCC Is Actually Asking

The public notice covers six distinct policy areas: spectrum access, experimental licensing, testbeds and innovation zones, Counter-UAS regulatory barriers, federal coordination, and market-based investment incentives. The FCC laid out each one with specific technical questions. This is not a vague call for ideas.

On spectrum, the core problem the FCC acknowledges is that most U.S. drones today operate on unlicensed frequencies: the same 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz bands shared with Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth devices. Those bands are crowded. They were never designed for the precision control links that Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations require. The FCC is now asking whether the industry should shift to licensed spectrum, and which bands make the most sense.

The 5030–5091 MHz band is the most discussed candidate. The FCC adopted initial service rules for drone use of that band in 2024, allocating a 10 MHz block at 5040–5050 MHz for direct frequency assignments. But the agency hasn’t taken the implementing steps to put the spectrum into active use. The April 1 notice asks how to accelerate that, and whether to convene a Federal Advisory Committee to resolve outstanding technical and operational questions in the band. The commission is also revisiting the 960–1164 MHz band, asking whether earlier reluctance to open it for UAS should be reconsidered, and whether flexible-use commercial wireless bands (800 MHz cellular, Citizens Broadband Radio Service at 3.5 GHz, and others) should have their current airborne restrictions lifted.

Experimental Licensing and Innovation Zones

The FCC’s experimental licensing process is slow. The agency admits it. The notice asks whether to create a dedicated UAS experimental license category with faster approvals and broader geographic testing parameters, and whether to issue blanket experimental authorizations for “qualified drone developers” operating within specified frequency bands and safety parameters, eliminating case-by-case applications entirely.

On innovation zones, the FCC points to its Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) testbed at North Carolina State University, established in 2021, and asks whether AERPAW has enough capacity and flexibility to develop UAS at meaningful scale. The commission also floats the idea of a new Innovation Zone category exclusively for defense companies and non-academic commercial UAS developers, and asks whether a zone over waterways would help facilitate UAS-to-ship interactions for naval applications.

Counter-UAS rules get their own section. Today, Section 333 of the Communications Act of 1934 prohibits willful interference with licensed radio communications, which creates a legal problem for any counter-drone system that jams or disrupts a UAS signal, even one posing a threat. The FCC is asking how to address that statutory barrier and whether the commission’s current rules should distinguish between research and development uses of Counter-UAS versus actual operational mitigation and enforcement.

The Approvals Already in Motion

The FCC isn’t starting from zero. Since January 2025, the commission has granted 227 UAS experimental approvals, a 68 percent increase compared to the entire 2021–2024 period, along with eight Counter-UAS approvals. FCC Chair Brendan Carr described those eight as the first Counter-UAS experimental licenses the agency has ever issued. Several went to the Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) for implementation of the administration’s drone dominance strategy.

“At the FCC, we are doing our part to promote U.S. drone leadership by cutting red tape, modernizing obsolete regulations, and securing a domestic drone supply chain,” Carr said in a statement accompanying the notice.

The public notice builds directly on two executive orders signed June 6, 2025: Unleashing American Drone Dominance and Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty. Those orders directed all federal agencies to prioritize domestic UAS production and reduce dependence on foreign systems. The FCC’s December 2025 decision to add all foreign-produced drones and critical components to its Covered List was the most visible implementation of that directive. Four enterprise systems received conditional approvals and were removed from the list in March 2026, all non-Chinese manufacturers, while DJI’s Ninth Circuit challenge to the December ban remains pending.

Law enforcement gets a dedicated section in the notice. The FCC is asking how to coordinate with state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies that regularly procure drones, and whether the government should actively incentivize or require those agencies to buy American-made systems.

DroneXL’s Take

The spectrum problem is real and has been real for years. I covered the FCC’s first attempt to address it back in 2023 when the commission proposed service rules for the 5030–5091 MHz band, and what I wrote then still applies: the agency took the first step, declared victory, and then let the band sit dormant for two years. The April 1 notice asks the industry why that implementation stalled and what it would take to actually use the spectrum that was already allocated. That’s the right question, finally asked out loud.

The Counter-UAS piece is where I’d focus if I were filing comments. Section 333 of the Communications Act is a genuine barrier, not a bureaucratic technicality, and the FCC has never formally addressed how it applies to operational drone interdiction. Every public safety agency running a Counter-UAS program has been operating in a legal gray area on RF jamming, and no one in Washington has been willing to say so clearly. This notice does. That alone makes it worth engaging with, regardless of how the broader industrial policy plays out.

The harder question is whether any of this reaches manufacturers that actually matter to the commercial market before January 1, 2027, when the current exemption window closes. The FCC is running a comment period, which feeds a rulemaking, which takes time. Meanwhile, all the exemptions expire on the same date, and the domestic supply chain the government says it wants to build doesn’t exist yet at the scale needed to replace it. By the end of 2026, the FCC will either have produced a credible regulatory framework that gives U.S. manufacturers a real runway, or it will be managing another emergency exemption cycle. Watch which way that breaks. It will tell you everything about whether “American drone dominance” is a policy or a slogan.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.