To the Point: The Under the Radar Risk of Letting Counter-Drone Authorities Expire with Matt Hayden

Show Notes

In this episode of Cyber Focus: To the Point, Frank Cilluffo sits down with Matt Hayden, former DHS official and current GDIT executive, to unpack the looming expiration of the Preventing Emerging Threats Act. Together, they explore the growing dangers posed by drones—from hobbyist disruptions to nation-state threats—and what’s at stake if Congress fails to reauthorize key counter-UAS authorities by October 1. Hayden explains why current authorities are essential for protecting the homeland and how they fall short when it comes to local law enforcement, airports, and evolving drone technology.

Op-Ed: Flying under the radar: Congress is poised to let key counter-drone authorities lapse

Transcript

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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:00]:
Foreign I’m Frank Cilluffo, and this is To the Point where we drill deep and get to the heart of what matters on one or two pressing issues of the day. Today’s episode is going to be focused on the potential expiration of the Preventing Emerging Threats act, which most Americans are probably not aware of, but have very significant authorities to be able to counter drones or UAS Unmanned Aerial vehicles. Have the privilege to sit down with Matt Hayden, who is an executive at GDIT, former senior leader at CISA, and dare I say, a senior fellow at the McCrary Institute. Matt, great to sit down with you.

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Matt Hayden [00:00:44]:
Happy to be here.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:45]:
So, Matt, let’s start with sort of the act itself and why it’s significant and what it means.

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Matt Hayden [00:00:51]:
Yeah. So the actual act itself came at a time when, when the government wasn’t prepared to respond to the threat of drones with payloads that we did not see emerging years in advance. We actually had to come to the Hill almost hat in hand and say, look, there is a national security threat. We have people in large gatherings that we need to make sure are secure domestically. That authority needs to exist. And as a product, it came out that, you know, this could happen. We just had to do it on a case by case basis, work through the faa, and a process was produced. Now we’re looking at a situation in which if there is a hobbyist drone that has a payload that’s known bad, there are ways to take it down so it doesn’t create a problem for the homeland.

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Matt Hayden [00:01:40]:
So we want to make sure that the way things are today, we don’t have a risk moving into the future.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:01:46]:
And we’ve seen the use of drone. It’s a consistent element of conflict these days. Obviously in Ukraine, Middle East, Africa, you name the hotspot, there’s been a UAS incident. So the implications are real. And we’ve had a steady drumbeat of reauthorizing CISA 2015 SLCGP, but this one was not on my radar screen until recently.

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Matt Hayden [00:02:11]:
Yeah. The real need is to also look at the way that it’s starting to evolve and the way that the authority was originally crafted only allowed for the feds to have that disciplined approach to do mitigations. There was always a local and state law enforcement angle in which they said, look, whatever training you need us to do, whatever coordination you need us to do, we should be able to do this. When you talk to administration officials and law enforcement across the like, they still believe that’s the correct path to scale this into a broader avenue but we can’t even comprehend that until we get kind of this process a little better entrenched.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:02:50]:
And the world’s changed a lot since 2018, when the act was promulgated. So stepping us five years back in history is not the direction we wanted to go.

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Matt Hayden [00:03:01]:
Right. And it was not complete at that time either. So airports were excluded from that language. And so we immediately saw across the world, starting with Gatwick and other airports, all the way up to this month, where you have drones of varying sizes disrupting commercial as well as passenger and private air traffic at major airports and.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:03:22]:
Number of near misses. Right, so this. Is this a hobbyist issue or is it a nation state concern or both or not?

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Matt Hayden [00:03:30]:
Because. Because the challenge is you have them running on the same wire, so you. The whole dual use conversation comes in what you have to do for hobbyists, you also have to do for nation state because if you leave a back door in one, they’ll exploit the other.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:03:41]:
So on October 1st, assuming Congress doesn’t act, are we going to have far fewer capabilities to respond?

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Matt Hayden [00:03:52]:
If we look at the way the authorities behave today, and not having them today, not having them into the future, you’ll have a federal authority missing to provide for protection for the homeland. So the homeland will not have the capabilities to secure it as it does today should that lapse.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:04:10]:
And that lapse will also affect critical infrastructure owner operators.

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Matt Hayden [00:04:15]:
Right, to the extent that they have federal coordination and current federal authorities. Because keep in mind, state and locals don’t have the ability to lend them their authority or to direct a mitigation. There’s always been the ability to kind of scan the skies and have passive acknowledgement of what’s in your airspace, but the ability to do something about it when you know there’s a threat is where this authority really comes into play. We see this a lot with concert owners. Things that are like those tier one events like the super bowl, these are all large events that we need to make sure that security is in place and currently are a part of all security plans moving forward. So there’s going to have to be a lot of attention paid to this.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:04:53]:
Matt. What didn’t I ask that I should [have]?

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Matt Hayden [00:04:56]:
So when we look at drones, they’re usually a challenge about payloads, but there’s also the ability to collect intelligence. There’s the other aspects of drones that we don’t really know how the authority’s going to need to evolve. And so as Congress takes a look at this, they need to make sure they’re looking at all the features of that low altitude kind of orbit challenge.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:05:19]:
So I’m not going to ask you to be a gambling man, but what do you think happens tomorrow?

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Matt Hayden [00:05:24]:
It all signs are looking to shut down. We happen to be recording right before the president’s doing his meetings with the four corners on the Hill. It seems like everyone’s pretty entrenched. Obviously, we hope for that silver lining where they find a conversation that allows them to keep the government open. But nobody’s showing their cards in that direction yet.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:05:41]:
And we expect some legislative relief in the continuing resolution one way or another.

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Matt Hayden [00:05:48]:
The expectation is kind of a standing order to keep things moving until a full formal, longer CR or formal appropriations package pushes. But there’s a lot that’s got to come out of his GAC for that to happen. So there’s going to be a lot of attention on that committee, specifically.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:06:01]:
Matt, thank you for spending some time with us for going deep in an issue that really does matter. All right.

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Matt Hayden [00:06:06]:
Thank you.

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Frank Cilluffo [00:06:06]:
Thank you. And if you want to read more, we did drop an op ed Kyle Klein, my colleague at the McCrary Institute and myself wrote this morning. You can find the link in our show notes.