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Duffy Hosts a Press Conference on Unleashing American Drone Dominance, Aug. 5, 2025

August 5, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:31:16

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy held a press conference on unleashing American drone dominance, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, Lisa Elman, CEO of the Commercial Drone Alliance, and Heather Lee, COO of AUVSI, as Duffy introduced them. He announced a proposed rule that will make Beyond Visual Line of Sight drone operations safe, secure, routine, and scalable, as the department’s description states the rule’s purpose, following the President’s executive order directing the cabinet to put drone technology at the forefront, as Duffy stated the backdrop.

Duffy framed the problem as he stated it: China controls 90 percent of the consumer drone market, and the barrier for American innovators has not been ability but a bureaucracy that makes it incredibly difficult to innovate, as he put it. The change, he said, would reach the way people and products move through the airspace — package and coffee delivery by drone among the examples he gave — with the larger stakes in manufacturing, farming, and energy production, as he stated them. Industry speakers at the event described the rule as enabling the scaling of applications such as infrastructure inspection, emergency response, and precision agriculture, with billions in positive economic impact, as stated at the press conference.

Why it matters

The drone rule is Duffy’s deregulation doctrine applied to the newest part of the airspace: a single proposed rule to move beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations from case-by-case waivers to routine operations, announced with the industry’s two leading associations on stage and framed explicitly as a competition with China for the skies.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidate: the proposed Beyond Visual Line of Sight drone rule announced August 5, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Hosts Press Conference on Unleashing American Drone Dominance” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy and the industry speakers at the press conference.