Trump Orders Security Assessment of Drones Made in China

One of President Trump’s last acts in office was ordering a security assessment of U.S. drones made in China and other nations considered “foreign adversaries.”

I’m actually a little surprised this hasn’t happened sooner – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a number of federal roles, including border patrol, search and rescue, FEMA roles, surveillance, and of course, warfighting, and it’s incumbent on the U.S. to ensure critical tech like that isn’t being used as upscaled spyware.

And so on Monday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to assess security risks in Chinese (and “foreign adversary”) drones and remove them. The “adversary” list also includes nations like Russia, Iran and North Korea.

According to Reuters, the order mandates “potential steps that could be taken to mitigate these risks, including, if warranted, discontinuing all federal use of covered (drones) and the expeditious removal of (drones) from federal service.”

Again, considering the Trump administration’s focus on countering China’s growing geopolitical influence, this is hardly surprising – over the last four years, Chinese telecom giant Huawei faced constant scrutiny and just last month, the U.S. added DJI (Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies Ltd.), the world’s largest drone manufacturer, to its list of companies that couldn’t purchase American technology without special permission.

With a new administration – sporting polar opposite views on just about everything – taking the reigns, it’s unclear how far this inquiry will progress, but I can’t imagine President Biden will suddenly reverse our stringent oversight of Chinese companies and technology.