Review – HR 1386 Introduced – State Department cUAS Authority

Back in February Rep Mills (R,FL) introduced HR 1386, the Department of State domestic protection mission. The bill would allow the Secretary of State may take, such actions that are necessary to mitigate a credible threat that an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft poses to the safety or security of a covered facility or asset. No new funding is authorized by this legislation.

The bill is similar to HR 7586 that was introduced by Mills in March of 2024. The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a business meeting on May 16^th, 2024 that included consideration of that bill. As part of an en bloc consideration of eleven bills, HR 7586 was ordered reported favorably by a vote of 37 to 2. No report was published. Interestingly, that bill was mentioned in a Congressional Research Service report on UAS restrictions and protections.

Moving Forward

Mills and both of his cosponsors {Rep Lawler (R,NY), Rep McCaul (R,TX)} are members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to which this bill was assigned for primary consideration. This means that there should be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. As in the 118^th session, I suspect that there would be broad bipartisan support for this bill in the Foreign Affairs Committee. The question becomes if there would be similar support in the three other committees to which this bill was assigned “for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.” See the Commentary below for a more detailed explanation. I do not see such support forthcoming from any of the three ‘other’ committee chairs.

Commentary

The main concern in those three other committees (Transportation, Judiciary, and Energy and Commerce) would be the blanket exception {“Notwithstanding section 46502 of title 49, United States Code, sections 32, 1030, 1367, and chapters 119 and 206 of title 18, United States Code, or section 705 of the Communications Act of 1934” in §1(a)} to a number of existing statutes under purview of those committees. Under House rules, any of those three committee chairs could veto bringing this bill to the floor for consideration.

Before there is any chance of comprehensive counter UAS legislation passing into law, someone is going to have to come up with specific language to address the limits of the exceptions to those statutes listed in §1(a).

 

For more information on the provisions of this bill, including expanded commentary, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-1386-introduced - subscription required.