The FBI is going back to federal budget regulators for sign-off on the paperwork that local police departments must file when they take down or track drones under the SAFER SKIES Act — the law that, since July 1, has let certified state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) agencies detect and disable drones deemed a credible threat at stadiums, festivals and other public events.

A notice published in the Federal Register on September 1 shows the FBI, acting on behalf of the Department of Justice, is seeking Office of Management and Budget approval to revise a previously approved information-collection requirement tied to the SAFER SKIES counter-UAS framework. The filing is a routine but consequential step under the Paperwork Reduction Act: before a federal agency can require the public — in this case, police departments — to report information to it, OMB has to bless the exact form that reporting takes. Revising an existing collection means the FBI wants to change what agencies are asked to submit, not scrap the requirement.

The notice carries OMB control number 1110-0090 and opens a 60-day public comment window that runs through November 2, 2026. Anyone — including the law enforcement agencies subject to the rule, civil liberties groups, or the general public — can submit comments on the proposed revision during that period.

What SAFER SKIES Actually Does

SAFER SKIES was signed into law as part of the fiscal year 2026 defense authorization in December 2025, following a presidential order on domestic airspace issued in June 2025. It created a legal pathway for local law enforcement — not just federal agencies — to detect and physically disable drones that pose a credible threat, an authority that had previously been tightly restricted to a small set of federal entities under existing counter-UAS statutes.

DHS and DOJ followed up with an interim final rule that took effect July 1, 2026, laying out the operational guardrails local agencies must meet before they can exercise that authority. According to reporting on the rule, participating agencies must complete operator training and certification, maintain a formal C-UAS Operations Plan, coordinate with federal authorities on airspace use, and file incident reports when mitigation actions are taken. The interim final rule's own comment period — on the substance of the rule itself — is separate from the FBI's new paperwork notice and is set to close September 4, 2026.

The information-collection notice published September 1 is narrower: it governs the specific forms, reports and data fields the FBI collects from agencies as they operate under that framework, not the underlying authority to jam or disable drones itself.

Why the Distinction Matters

Two clocks are now running in parallel, and it's easy to conflate them. The interim final rule's public comment period — covering whether the training, certification and operations-plan requirements themselves are sound policy — closes September 4, 2026. The FBI's Paperwork Reduction Act notice, covering how those agencies report data back to the federal government once they're operating under the rule, has its own 60-day window closing November 2, 2026. A local police department, a vendor, or an advocacy group with concerns about the substance of the counter-drone authority needs to act before the earlier deadline; concerns about the reporting burden or the specific data fields being collected fall under the later one.

Because SAFER SKIES ties mitigation authority to compliance with the interim final rule's requirements — training, certification, an operations plan, and reporting — the information-collection instrument is not a bureaucratic afterthought. It's the mechanism by which the FBI verifies, at scale, that agencies exercising drone-jamming or drone-disabling authority are actually meeting the conditions attached to that authority. A revision to that collection can add, remove, or reshape the data points agencies are required to hand over about their operations.

Who This Touches

Coverage of the interim final rule has specifically named major sports and public-gathering contexts — MLB, NASCAR and NFL events — as security environments directly reshaped by the new counter-UAS framework. Any SLTT law enforcement agency that wants mitigation authority at those kinds of venues, or at comparable public gatherings, has to operate inside the DHS/DOJ rule's requirements, which in turn means filing the reports covered by this OMB collection.

Why It Matters

SAFER SKIES marked a significant expansion of who in American law enforcement is legally allowed to detect and disable drones — a power that, until this year, sat almost exclusively with a handful of federal agencies. That expansion came with conditions: certification, an operations plan, airspace coordination, and incident reporting. The paperwork behind those conditions is not incidental to the policy — it is the accountability layer that lets DOJ and DHS track how, where, and how often local agencies are actually exercising jamming or disabling authority against drones.

A revision to the underlying information collection is worth watching for what it adds or removes. A collection that asks for more granular incident data — location, drone type, method of mitigation, outcome — gives federal regulators and the public a clearer picture of how the authority is being used nationwide. A collection that narrows what's reported does the opposite. With the comment period open until November 2, agencies, oversight groups, and the public still have a formal channel to weigh in on which way that goes before OMB finalizes the revised requirement.

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