DJI asks the Ninth Circuit to order the FCC to rule on its Covered List reconsideration petition

TLDR

• DJI asked the Ninth Circuit, in a petition dated 2 November, to direct the FCC to rule on reconsideration.¹
• DJI says its 21 January reconsideration request is undecided; the FCC says there should be no concern about delay.¹
• DJI puts its losses since December 2025 at hundreds of millions of dollars; those figures are DJI's own.¹

Drone Authority reports that DJI has asked the Ninth Circuit for a writ of mandamus directing the full FCC "to resolve DJI's petition for reconsideration promptly".¹ The petition is dated 2 November and is listed on the court docket as No. 26-7367, with FCC lawyers entering appearances on 4 November and no response or ruling shown when Drone Authority read it on 6 November.¹ This rests on Drone Authority alone: no other outlet reviewed carries the petition, and the docket was not independently opened.¹ The underlying dispute is the FCC's December 2025 Covered List action, and DJI's reconsideration petition (ET Docket 26-22) was filed on 21 January.¹

DJI argues that updating the list is, in the FCC's own 2020 wording, "a non-discretionary, ministerial act", and cites the Huawei and ZTE designation decisions, each issued less than six months after a reconsideration request.¹ It also argues that the four-page assessment behind the listing never mentions DJI and came from an interagency body rather than one of the five agencies the law names, and asks that, at a minimum, the FCC be made to decide its pending authorisation requests for non-drone products.¹ The harm figures are DJI's own: it says it is "experiencing daily, seven-figure losses", puts total losses since December 2025 "in the hundreds of millions", and says the FCC set aside authorisations for 19 existing DJI products.¹

The FCC's position was made before this petition arrived. On 16 October it renewed its motion to dismiss DJI's earlier case, No. 26-1029, saying the staff-level notice is not a final order and that DJI cannot go to court while reconsideration is pending, and told the court "there should be no concern about undue agency delay".¹ It added that if it does not act within a reasonable period, DJI may seek relief only through mandamus.¹ Drone Authority says DJI opposed the dismissal motion on 2 November and asked the court to keep the earlier case on hold while the new petition is considered.¹

Why it matters: the filing is a request, not a ruling, and DJI's position on the Covered List is unchanged, though the court's response will show how it treats the FCC's argument that delay is not yet a concern.¹