FBI seeks three-year OMB approval for SAFER SKIES counter-UAS paperwork, estimating 1,850 state and local agencies

TLDR

• Federal Register notice of 4 November opens comment to 4 December on the FBI's SAFER SKIES counter-UAS reporting collection.¹
• The FBI estimates 1,850 state, local, tribal and territorial agencies and 28,689 annual hours across about 26,205 responses.¹
• The 1 September notice says five forms gained data elements, such as FAA concurrence and temporary flight restriction information.²

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for the Department of Justice, published a 30-day notice in the Federal Register on 4 November (91 FR 69576, OMB number 1110-0090) saying it will submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a revision of the SAFER SKIES State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) Counter-UAS Information Collection, with comments accepted until 4 December 2026.¹ The notice says the SAFER SKIES Act, Title LXXXVI of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, as implemented by an interim final rule codified at 6 CFR part 124 and 28 CFR part 124, extends counter-UAS detection and mitigation authority to SLTT law enforcement and correctional agencies, and that the collection covers the coordination, authorisation, reporting and recordkeeping submissions the rule requires, made through a designated federal portal.¹ The current approval was granted on an emergency basis and expires on 30 November 2026; the FBI is requesting a standard three-year approval.¹

The FBI estimates 1,850 respondent agencies, 28,689 hours of annual burden across about 26,205 annual responses and no other annual costs.¹ Time per respondent ranges from about five minutes for feedback on a listed counter-UAS system to about five hours for initial policy adoption and attestation, with a detection and warning operations plan estimated at about 45 minutes and a mitigation operations plan at about one hour.¹ The notice says the accreditation and certification needed to exercise the authority are required to obtain or retain a benefit, certain reports and notifications are mandatory, and a small number of instruments are voluntary.¹

The FBI says it received one public comment on the 60-day notice, from an independent researcher who supported the collection and raised questions about cost burden, the basis for the recordkeeping and plan estimates, retention of filed forms, access to the instruments and scope to reduce burden.¹ In response, it says it added a one-time form training line to the burden table, split the recordkeeping estimate by agency tier and raised the mitigation-tier figure, and committed to adding a State-law citation field to the Extended Retention Notification, publishing the data schema for each instrument and offering a one-step no-activity summary for detection-tier agencies.¹ It also says it is moving the instruments from the current offline, emailed workflow to a secure web portal, with go-live expected in the second or third quarter of fiscal year 2027.¹

The 1 September notice (91 FR 56212), the 60-day notice with comments to 2 November, says the FBI had revised five instruments since the emergency clearance: the advance notification, the operations plan, the testing, training and exercise plan, the policy attestation and the post-operation report.² It lists the principal additions as structured airspace and temporary flight restriction information, a retroactive filing path for emergency invocations, FAA concurrence and frequency restriction information on the operations plan, and expanded detection, mitigation and enforcement outcome fields on the post-operation report.² It says several per-response estimates are lower than under the emergency clearance because the revised forms replace free text with structured selections and let the operations plan inherit data from the advance notification, and that a separate operator training and certification record is under development and will be added in a later submission to OMB.² Both notices are government documents, and the burden figures are the FBI's own estimates.¹²

Why it matters: the notice asks OMB for a three-year approval of the forms state, local, tribal and territorial agencies file to use SAFER SKIES counter-UAS authority, with comments open until 4 December and the current emergency approval expiring on 30 November 2026.¹²