The U.S. Department of Transportation has put $9 million on the calendar for government agencies that want to inspect bridges, dams, and roads with drones. The forecast sits on Grants.gov as opportunity DOT-HASS-FY26-DIIG, now in its third revision after a July 28 update, with an estimated notice date of September 15, 2026 and applications closing November 15. USDOT expects to make about five awards ranging from $500,000 to the full $9 million.
This is the Drone Infrastructure Inspection Grants program, created by Congress in the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act. It is also the exact pot of money state aviation officials spent this past winter asking Washington to release, and their reason had very little to do with bridges.
Since December 22, 2025, federal funds cannot be used to buy, operate, or maintain Chinese-made drones. State transportation departments woke up that morning with grounded fleets and no budget line to replace them. DIIG is the closest thing to a federal answer, and it shows up more than eight months later at a fraction of what those agencies said they needed.
The Forecast Puts Roughly Five Awards Against Fifty States
USDOT will award the $9 million competitively to state governments, counties, cities and townships, federally recognized Tribal governments, metropolitan planning organizations, and consortia of those entities, according to the forecast published on Grants.gov. Private companies, nonprofits, and universities cannot apply, though they can participate as contractors or vendors to an eligible government applicant.
The federal share caps at 50 percent of total project cost. A lead applicant may request up to 75 percent in writing as part of the application, but only by demonstrating that the extra assistance is necessary to make full use of the grant. At the standard match, $9 million in federal money supports roughly $18 million in total project value nationwide.
Kenji Sugahara, Director of the Oregon Department of Aviation, flagged the forecast to state and local colleagues on LinkedIn and framed it as a partial fix. “We’ve been pushing for a larger appropriation but this is a great start!” he wrote, adding that the funding will offset some of the impact of the OMB memo.
Two fields on the Grants.gov listing are worth noticing because they are empty: estimated award date and estimated project start date. Agencies building FY27 budgets around this money have a submission deadline and nothing else. The award ceiling is also the entire program, which means one applicant could theoretically absorb all of it, even though USDOT expects five.
Congress Authorized $12 Million For This Year And Appropriators Sent $9
Section 912 of Public Law 118-63 authorizes $12 million for each of fiscal years 2025 through 2028, according to the statutory text codified as a note to 49 U.S.C. 44802. The FY26 forecast delivers $9 million, a quarter less than the authorized level, funded through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, enacted February 3, 2026.
The timeline is the sharper problem. Section 912 directed the Secretary to establish the grant program no later than 270 days after enactment, which set a deadline of February 10, 2025. The first application window is now forecast to close November 15, 2026, roughly 21 months past that date. The Oregon Department of Aviation white paper published in February reported that DIIG funds still had not reached the agencies they were written for.
There is a detail in the enacted law that most coverage of DIIG has never mentioned. Every standalone version of the Drone Infrastructure Inspection Grant Act, from the 2021 House bill through the 2023 Senate version, defined an “eligible small unmanned aircraft system” as one built by a company domiciled in the United States and not a covered foreign entity. That definition does not appear in Section 912 as enacted. Congress dropped it. The sourcing restriction now applies anyway, through a completely different legal channel.
DIIG Money Cannot Buy The Drones Most Agencies Already Own
That channel is the American Security Drone Act, passed as part of the FY2024 defense bill, and OMB Memorandum M-26-02, issued November 21, 2025, which extends the prohibition to grants and cooperative agreements with non-federal entities. Federal award money cannot procure or operate a drone made by a covered foreign entity, which in practice means DJI and Autel.
The same day the memo’s provisions took effect, the FCC swept foreign-made drones onto its Covered List, cutting off new equipment authorizations. DJI took that designation to the Ninth Circuit in February, and that case will outlast this grant cycle. A county that wins a DIIG award in 2027 will be buying from a shortlist that does not include the two manufacturers behind most of the aircraft its crews already know how to fly, and the replacement hardware costs multiples of what it displaces. This is the same squeeze DroneXL documented last month in Rensselaer County, New York, where a sheriff’s office with a mixed DJI and Autel fleet has no upgrade path from its own vendors.
Whether USDOT is even the right agency to be enforcing drone security policy is a live argument in the industry. Owen Morgan made the case at XPONENTIAL in May that security belongs at the FCC rather than DOT. DIIG puts DOT in the position of writing checks that carry someone else’s restrictions.
State Aviation Officials Asked For This Money In February
Sugahara sent DroneXL the Oregon Department of Aviation white paper in early March, and we published the findings on March 3. Compiled through the National Association of State Aviation Officials across 25 state transportation departments, it counted 467 grounded or restricted airframes among the 23 states that supplied explicit numbers, and put combined state and local national exposure at roughly $50 million to $2 billion.
The white paper’s recommendations named DIIG directly. It asked Congress to immediately appropriate the roughly $50 million authorized under the program as a down payment on the transition, alongside a compliance waiver running through September 2027. The precise authorization across FY2025 through FY2028 is $48 million, so the states were rounding, but the order of magnitude was the point.
Set the numbers side by side. The ask was $50 million with no match requirement attached. The forecast is $9 million at a 50 percent federal share. Against the white paper’s moderate planning scenario of about $56 million for state agencies alone, $9 million covers roughly 16 percent. Against the $2 billion high-end figure that includes counties, cities, MPOs, and contractors, it covers less than half of one percent.
DroneXL’s Take
DIIG was never designed to be a bailout. Congress wrote it in 2024 to help agencies start and grow drone inspection programs, to get workers off ropes and out from under bridge decks. That is a good program and I have argued for it. What happened instead is that a separate arm of the federal government shrank those same programs by grounding their aircraft, and now the growth fund is being asked to serve as the compensation fund. Same pot, opposite purpose, and a quarter of the authorized amount.
The honest read on this forecast is that it is not transition funding and nobody should sell it that way. Five awards. A 50 percent match that assumes agencies have matching dollars available, which is the precise assumption the Oregon white paper spent its length refuting. Indiana reported roughly $400,000 in affected equipment and no budget to replace any of it. An agency in that position cannot put up half of anything. The match requirement quietly filters out the states that got hit hardest, which is the opposite of how a repair should work.
Agencies should still apply. If your state or county has an inspection mission that fits, September 15 is a real date and the Subscribe button on the Grants.gov listing costs nothing. Nine million dollars is nine million dollars, and the agencies that win awards will do useful work with them: bridge decks surveyed without a snooper truck, dam faces mapped without a rope team, culverts inspected without confined-space entry. That is what drones are for and it is why this program deserved to exist in the first place.
The gap between what state aviation directors documented in February and what Washington put on the table in July is the whole story of how the drone ban was executed. The restriction arrived on a fixed date with legal force. The money arrived as a forecast, late, short, and with a match attached. If the policy was worth imposing, it was worth funding at the level the people implementing it said it would take. Sugahara and NASAO did the counting that no federal agency bothered to do, handed Washington a number, and got eighteen cents on the dollar.
Two dates are on the calendar. November 15 closes the application window, and the identity of those five awardees will tell you whether USDOT treats DIIG as an inspection-capability program or as ban triage. Then comes the FY2027 appropriations cycle, where Section 912 still authorizes $12 million and the ODAV waiver request still runs to September 2027. If appropriators fund DIIG to its authorization next year, the argument that this was a start holds up. If FY27 comes in at $9 million again, then $9 million is the ceiling, not the floor, and the states counting grounded airframes should plan accordingly.
Sources: Grants.gov forecast DOT-HASS-FY26-DIIG, 49 U.S.C. 44802 note (Pub. L. 118-63, Sec. 912), OMB Memorandum M-26-02, Public Law 119-75, Oregon Department of Aviation / NASAO white paper, Kenji Sugahara via LinkedIn
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
