The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved Part 91 waivers for more than 1,000 public safety agencies between April 2025 and February 2026, clearing each of them to fly drones beyond visual line of sight and putting every one of them a short step from a Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. A Freedom of Information Act release published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on July 23 names every agency, with approval dates and expiration dates attached.

The baseline makes the number land. An FAA representative told EFF the agency had granted 976 waivers for DFR-style operations in the seven years between the first DFR program in 2018 and April 2025. The ten months that followed beat the previous seven years combined.

DroneXL has tracked this curve all year, from 400-plus waivers last September to more than 1,100 by March. What’s new is the receipts.

EFF’s report comes with a spreadsheet and a map, and the list reads like a census of American public safety: the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department next to the Seward Police Department in Alaska, the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics next to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Boston Fire is on it. If you want to know whether your local department made the list, you can now look it up by name.

One Email to the FAA Started a Land Rush

The waiver behind the surge is the 91.113 Public Aircraft/Public Safety Operations Certificate of Waiver and Authorization, an expedited approval the FAA rolled out in April 2025 that qualifying agencies request by email, working from pre-built checklists instead of the bespoke safety cases that used to take months.

The FAA’s own FAQ lays out the deal. The new waiver replaced the Tactical BVLOS and First Responder BVLOS approvals that DroneXL covered back in 2023, folding flight relief and airspace authorization into one document. It comes in two tiers: shielded operations at or below 61 meters (200 feet) or close above rooftops and other obstructions, which roughly 87 percent of applicants choose, and a 122-meter (400-foot) tier for the roughly 13 percent that field FAA-acceptable detection and avoidance systems. Approvals run 48 months. Holders file no NOTAMs and owe the FAA no routine activity reports, though incident reporting still applies, and Standard Remote ID is required to fly BVLOS unless the FAA authorizes otherwise in writing.

The spreadsheet shows how fast the machine spun up. The first batch of applications hit the FAA’s inbox on April 15, 2025, and several cleared within two to three days. One absence stands out: volunteer fire departments and nonprofit search and rescue teams typically fail the public aircraft test, so a near-equivalent Part 107 waiver is their only route.

The List Measures Interest, Not Drones in the Air

A Part 91 waiver is a regulatory clearance, not a launched program, and the FAA is blunt that no dedicated DFR rulebook exists: applicants define their own concept of operations and get relief from the see-and-avoid rules written for pilots sitting inside an aircraft. In the agency’s own words, DFR is “a concept, not a special set of flight regulations.”

The expedited waiver also assumes one remote pilot per drone. The one-pilot-to-many-drones model that vendors are selling still requires case-by-case FAA review, which is why the multi-drone waivers held by 14 agencies as of Skydio’s March announcement were news in their own right.

Still, interest at this scale is its own story. When the FAA granted Fort Wayne’s waiver in five weeks under the old system, DroneXL reported that DRONERESPONDERS director Charles Werner saw the agency starting to open the door, and he predicted the DFR field would grow from 40 agencies to 400 within a year. The FOIA list shows reality lapped that forecast. The vendors feel it too: Axon told shareholders in its Q1 2026 letter that counter-drone and DFR were among its fastest-growing categories, estimating that “a DFR mission launches approximately every 30 seconds” in the United States.

EFF Sees a Surveillance Buildout Outrunning the Rules

EFF’s concern is what the same list looks like from the ground: a thousand agencies acquiring aircraft that can watch backyards and windows from angles a patrol car never reaches, before most of their cities have written a single rule about the footage.

The group points to a Government Technology analysis of Chula Vista’s deployment data showing that many flights answer low-level calls: noise complaints, mental health checks, and reports about unhoused people. It points to Flock Safety, which built license plate reading into its response drones, a story DroneXL covered when EFF surfaced the pitch deck last September. And it points to a leak of San Francisco Police Department drone footage, reported by WIRED, that showed how long a drone can linger over people who never know it is there.

EFF’s prescription is process, not prohibition: communities should get a say before acquisition, and agencies should log flights publicly. California already requires the former under AB 481. The latter has a proof of concept in Chula Vista, the department that invented DFR, which publishes every mission with a flight map and crossed 25,000 flights doing it.

DroneXL’s Take

DroneXL has covered DFR since Chula Vista flew these missions under waivers nobody else had, and six years of that reporting points one direction: this technology earns its keep. A drone that posts a 97-second average response on the calls it reaches first, and clears about one in five calls without a single unit rolling, is the strongest drones-for-good case in American policing.

Which is exactly why the thousand departments on this list should read the FAA’s FAQ as narrowly as the FAA wrote it. The waiver answers one question: whether these flights are safe for the airspace. It never claimed to answer the second question, what a city does with a permanent camera over its neighborhoods. That one now lands on a thousand communities at once, and the sheet’s own columns say when the bill comes due. These waivers run 48 months. The first wave expires in the spring of 2029, and every renewal will happen in front of a community that either got a flight portal and a policy, or got surprises.

The programs bolting plate readers onto response drones and flying them to noise complaints are writing the ordinances that will ground everyone else. I want drones finding missing kids and putting eyes on structure fires in 2030, flown by departments that kept the public’s trust. The pioneer agency logs every flight in public. A department with one dock and ten missions a week can manage the same. Publish the log. All of it. The agencies with nothing to hide have the strongest interest in proving it.

Sources: Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FAA Part 91 CoW/A FAQ, and Axon’s Q1 2026 shareholder letter.

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