NJ drone incidents spur government push for more counter-drone powers as current authorities set to expire
The mysterious drone phenomenon centered in New Jersey has prompted government officials to issue fresh calls for expanded power as their counter-drone authorization is set to expire this week.
The current drone-countering authorities — authorized as part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 — grant both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) authority to use advanced detection technologies to identify, track and intercept drones that aren’t complying with the law.
The 2018 measure exempts the agencies from other laws that prevent interference with aircraft and wiretapping without a warrant. It expires on Dec. 20, and lawmakers must attach a last-minute extension to a stopgap spending bill to fund the government this week in order to prevent a lapse.
But government officials say the 11th hour, piecemeal approach harms their ability to counter drone threats.
"We cannot appropriately budget, we can’t strategically plan for the future," Steven Willoughby, deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-drone office, said during a security forum last week.
"The administration has been seeking, for several years now, additional authorities to expand the counter-UAS authorities, both of the federal government, which are themselves very limited, and also to give state and local authorities the authority to use certain C-UAS technologies with federal oversight," a senior Biden administration official told reporters on a call over the weekend. "That legislation has been pending."
A DHS official said that while there is "no known malicious activity in New Jersey," the sightings there "highlight a gap in our current authorities, and so we would also urge Congress to pass our important counter-UAS legislation."
The White House-backed Counter-UAS Authority, Security and Reauthorization Act of 2024 would expand the government’s drone authorities and renew them until 2028 — and add new state and local drone authorities.
But a separate, bipartisan House plan would scale back the proposed state and local authorities in favor of authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to take down drones, instead of just regulating their use in airspace.
But lawmakers don’t have time to hash out their disputes over which agency should get what authority before agencies lose their powers entirely — so the narrow extension of authority attached to the stopgap measure is only expected to last a matter of months.
For nearly a month, New Jersey residents have alerted authorities to sightings of mysterious drones, some as wide as six feet, hovering in the sky at night. Sightings have ranged from 4 to 180, and some of them seem to be operating in a coordinated manner, and some unmanned aerial systems have been spotted near the Army's Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle.
Law enforcement has been able to offer little explanation for the phenomenon — but steered the public away from the assumption that the drones originate with a foreign adversary.
"To date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent," a Defense Department official told reporters over the weekend. "But I just got to simply tell you we don’t know."
"We have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin. We have very limited authorities when it comes to moving off base," the official added.
"We’re also significantly restricted, and rightfully so — in fact, prohibited — from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance here in the homeland."
Additional unauthorized drone sightings have been recorded near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where officials closed the airspace for four hours due to the sighting, and Ramstein U.S. Air Force Base in Germany in recent days.