President Donald Trump spent the last year breaking open a counter-drone system that kept too much authority bottled up in Washington. His June 2025 airspace order pushed federal agencies to build state and local detection capacity and a national training center. In December, he signed the FY2026 defense authorization with the SAFER SKIES Act, giving trained state and local law enforcement new authority to act against drones that pose credible threats.
That was the right political decision. Washington cannot protect every prison, stadium, power plant, and public gathering from a centralized control room.
Now the software needs to catch up.
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The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security put the new law into operation with an interim rule effective July 1. It is more serious than a simple license to jam drones. It requires training and certification, authorized technologies, a C-UAS Operations Plan for defined locations and time windows, federal coordination, airspace awareness, reporting, and a certified operator who retains professional judgment over whether to act. Public comments remain open until Sept. 4.
The next requirement should move those legal boundaries into the execution path itself.
Imagine a drone approaching a correctional facility. Radar sees it. An RF sensor detects its control link. A camera confirms the track. The operator is certified, and the facility has a valid operations plan. That is still not enough for a safety-critical system to assume every mitigation command is valid.
The drone can be real. The order can still be wrong.
A valid detection answers one question: what is in the sky? Authority answers another: who may do what about it, where, and for how long? Those facts should not live only in a training record, an operations plan, or an operator’s memory. They should be machine-enforceable conditions on the command itself.
The system should require two keys.
The first is evidence. The target track should carry its identity, time, location, sensor support, and current confidence. The second is authority. The command should carry a verifiable credential proving that this operator or agency is authorized, at this location and time, to use this specific category of mitigation.
Only when both refer to the same event should the command be executable.
A police badge should not become a root password for the sky.
This does not mean turning legal judgment over to an algorithm. The interim rule is right to preserve the certified operator’s independent judgment. The software’s job is narrower: prevent an otherwise valid human decision from exceeding the authority that makes it lawful. If the operation has expired, the target has crossed outside the approved area, the wrong mitigation method is selected, or the credential is stale, the system should refuse the command and say why.
The rule already creates much of the data needed to do this. Operations plans specify location and duration. Agencies must identify system configurations and software versions. Overlapping operations require lead-agency coordination. Mitigation operators must hold current certification. Known authorized aircraft must be checked before action.
Those safeguards are strongest when the machine can enforce them at the moment of execution.
Trump was right to move counter-drone authority closer to the threat. Decentralization is what makes rapid local response possible. But decentralizing authority without encoding its boundaries leaves the hardest safeguards dependent on people recalling every condition under pressure.
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DHS and Justice still have time to tighten that design while the rule is open for comment. They should require authorized counter-drone systems to bind current evidence to current authority before a mitigation command can execute.
Trump fixed the political authority problem. Now, Washington should make sure the software knows exactly where that authority ends.
Burak Oktenli is an independent researcher based in Washington, DC. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the University of South Florida and an MBA, and is completing a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown University.