Inside The Trump Admin’s Approach To Drones And The Future Of Aviation

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s administration believes “the future of aviation is unmanned,” White House Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior ​Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka shared on Friday, and the administration is scrutinizing the next generation of drone reforms to restore confidence in American airspace. 

Speaking to investors and drone organizations at the American Drone Leadership Summit, Gorka stressed that the administration takes unmanned aviation incredibly seriously, including the role that commercial groups can play in securing American airspace.

The current posture of the U.S. is driven in part by the drones spotted near Trump’s New Jersey golf club in Bedminster, Gorka shared on Friday. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said later that the drones were “authorized to be flown by the FAA,” but their presence had startled the president and his team.

“It didn’t need to change my perspective [on drones],” laughed Gorka when asked by The Daily Wire how the Bedminster incidents affected the U.S. approach to drones. “It needed to change the president’s.”

That was why the first meeting of the National Security Council under Trump 2.0 was specifically about drones, he emphasized in remarks delivered to the American Drone Leadership Summit on Friday. The meeting was driven by the “disastrous governmental response, also state and local, to the Bedminster incident above one of the president’s properties.”

“This has been an issue since the get-go,” he argued. “For generations, Americans looked at the skies with hope.”

Bedminster’s biggest issue was that “there was so much information” that authorities didn’t have a clear picture of which drones were there since “there were so many different types” of aircraft or duplications on their radar — “We just weren’t collating information accurately,” he explained.

A huge part of American aviation safety involves cooperation of the entities that want to be shipping on a massive scale by drone, Gorka told The Daily Wire: DoorDash, Walmart, and the like. If air traffic is managed by these companies, that is also a bonus for “us mitigating bad guys.”

Gorka explained that if authorities have a picture such as a Maven equivalent — a reference to the Pentagon’s AI targeting and analysis program — then they have much greater knowledge of airspace movement. 

“Something comes into it that isn’t delivering your pizza, and doesn’t have an ID that is deliberately not squawking. Then, for the SLTT [state, local, tribal, and territorial authorities], for the local police, for the feds around a sensitive site, we go, ‘Oh, well, that’s useful.’ Maybe we have to further investigate and potentially mitigate.”

“So it’s actually a win-win,” he noted. “You want to build this completely revolutionary commercial delivery system? Okay, well you’re going to have to manage the airspace. If you manage the airspace, we’re going to be safer from bad guys as well.”

As he described how the United States tackled security for the FIFA World Cup (and America250 events still running through the end of the year), Gorka shared how all drone incidents surrounding the events were mitigated: “none were an issue in terms of a threat to the innocent people at those events.”

“One year ago,” he noted, “we could not have made a promise to keep millions of people safe. Today, we can, not because of another printed strategy document, but because thousands of public servants and private sector partners executed that strategy together with us and with the president.”

(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

As for threats to the public throughout the World Cup, Gorka shared that while authorities seized more than 700 drones and aircraft during the events, “no weaponized drones were seized.”

Professional commercial drone operators “overwhelmingly embraced safety” throughout the events, he noted. The greatest challenge actually came from recreational users or from incidental drone operators, people who were just playing around with drones —  there was an 87% noncompliance rate among recreational operators, who pushed into temporary flight restrictions. Their intent was harmless, but Gorka and his team still believe that they need the ability to stop these drones from entering secure airspaces.

“They’re simply Americans using an incredible new technology,” he explained. “Our responsibility is not to force every drone owner through the same pathway that a professional pilot must take. Our responsibility is to make safety intuitive, part of the operation.”

How will the United States deal with these recreational devices? Gorka suggested “compliance by design, better remote ID, better electronic conspicuity.”

“Technology that helps ordinary users make the safe choices before they even take off,” he explained. “That will protect the public. That will allow innovation to flourish.”

This could be done electronically or physically, Gorka told The Daily Wire as he spoke to reporters after the event.

“If you put up a [temporary flight restriction] over a sensitive event like the Super Bowl or what have you, we would like drones that are incapable of flying into TFR. That’s our first line of defense.”

The United States is carefully examining the next generation of drone reforms, the Senior Director for Counterterrorism shared, including completing protections for critical infrastructure, strengthening remote ID, expanding professional training, clarifying authorities for detection technologies, improving low-altitude awareness, and “preserving one national standard for domestic counter-drone operators.”

“These are not isolated initiatives; they are the next phase of restoring confidence in American airspace, because airspace sovereignty is more than a government program; it’s a national principle,” he argued. “Every sovereign nation protects its land. You don’t have a country unless you have sovereignty. That is a national principle. That’s why we have secured our borders, our land borders. Every sovereign nation protects its waterways, its shorelines. America must also exercise sovereignty over its low-altitude airspace.”

All of this, Gorka said, is part of America First.

“History will not remember us because of the number of executive orders the president signed or regulations we published,” he said. “It will remember whether American families could gather safely under secure skies. It will remember whether innovators could build the future of aviation here, and that is our goal.”

“The future of aviation is unmanned,” he added, “and it will remember whether the United States chose to lead or react.”