The Drone Service Providers Alliance has gone outside its own charter to ask every drone pilot and first responder in the country to call Congress about the Department of Homeland Security’s Blue UAS test report. Vic Moss, DSPA’s CEO and co-founder, published the appeal on September 27, two days after DroneXL reported that three of the five Blue UAS DHS brought to Manhattan could not hold position there. DSPA exists to advocate for commercial drone service providers, and Moss opens his post by saying this is one of the times the group has to stray from that.

The ask is a country-agnostic security standard. Congress should name a federal agency to test the security of every drone flying in U.S. airspace, and the results, not the country of manufacture, should decide what public safety agencies may buy. Congress wrote almost exactly that instruction into law in December 2024. The deadline passed nine months ago with no agency having done the work.

DSPA Says a Blue List Checkmark Proves Nothing About Doing the Job

DSPA’s case rests on one line DHS wrote itself: a Blue UAS designation tells an agency a drone meets federal sourcing and cybersecurity rules, and says nothing about whether it can do the mission. Moss cites the report’s 50-foot link losses and $13,964 to $56,195 prices as the evidence.

The DSPA post hosts its own copy of the 47-page DHS report and walks through the same findings DroneXL covered in DHS Lab Grounds 3 of 5 Blue UAS in NYC, Withholds Chinese Drone Scores: the three aircraft that could not hold position at Hudson Yards, the Parrot flyaway, and the Teal 2 pairing failures that kept it on the ground for up to 15 minutes. Moss is careful not to overreach. He writes that some Blue UAS performed considerably better than others, names the Skydio X10D as the standout, and lands on a single sentence: “a cybersecurity or procurement designation is not a substitute for operational capability.”

The part of the report Moss calls its most important sentence is the one about the drones DHS did not score in public. The lab flew covered-nation aircraft, its term for Chinese-made drones, alongside the Blue UAS at Hudson Yards because agencies still rely on them for reliability and performance. Its executive summary says evaluators found large capability differences between the two groups. The numbers appear nowhere in the document. “Results related to the covered nation platforms is available to public safety agencies upon request,” the report says, and gives [email protected] as the address. Moss allows that DHS may have a reason for holding the comparison back, notes that the report does not say what it is, and asks why first responders and the members of Congress voting on drone bans should not see it too.

Congress Ordered the Security Test DSPA Wants in 2024 and Nobody Ran It

Section 1709 of the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December 2024, gave an unnamed national security agency one year to audit DJI and Autel, with both added to the FCC Covered List automatically if no audit happened. The deadline was December 23, 2025. No agency ran it.

The Drone Service Providers Alliance wants that provision fixed rather than repeated. Its post asks Congress to name the agency, broaden the audit to every manufacturer selling into the National Airspace System, and hold that agency to the deadline. The standards that come out of it would apply to aircraft, control links, apps, cloud services and data storage, and a drone that fails them gets no pass for being built in the United States or an allied country.

DJI’s head of global policy, Adam Welsh, described the 2024 provision to DroneXL last December as a trap door: a ban that triggered on nobody doing anything. The FCC did not wait for the trap to spring. On December 22, 2025, one day before the Section 1709 deadline, it added every foreign-made drone and critical component to the Covered List on the strength of an interagency national security determination issued the day before. The audit Congress had ordered a year earlier had not happened. Moss made the same argument against the FCC’s follow-on proposal to ban foreign military-grade drones in a 35-minute video in August, when he told the Commission that its seven capability categories would sweep up the aircraft firefighters and search teams already fly. The DHS report has now handed him the federal government’s own test data to attach to the same point.

DroneXL’s Take

Vic Moss is asking Congress for the policy DroneXL has argued for throughout the DJI ban debate: a security standard every manufacturer has to pass, in place of a ban keyed to a passport. He now has a DHS lab report to attach to it and is asking pilots to carry it into their senators’ offices. Do it. Agencies can already request the covered-nation scores from NUSTL, so the people spending the money are not locked out. The people who wrote the ban are. The Hudson Yards comparison was flown in July 2025, seven months after Section 1709 became law, and the FCC cited none of it when it acted on December 22. My read is that the comparison was never meant to inform the ban. The ban was designed to happen without one, which is what Welsh told DroneXL in December and what then happened. DSPA’s post links the USAGov page that finds your senators and representative. When you call, ask one question: which agency will run the test Section 1709 already ordered, and when.

Sources: DSPA, DHS Tested Blue UAS for First Responders. Why The Results Should Worry Everyone, September 27, 2026; Blue UAS for First Responders Comparative Assessment Report, SAVER-T-R-39, DHS S&T / NUSTL, September 2026

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