Awaiting US-wide legal ban, US pols seek tariff hikes on DJI drones

When lethal legislation takes too long, attack with tariffs. That’s the logic of Washington lawmakers now calling on the Biden Administration to increase import fees on DJI drones, even as they continue pushing a draft law to prohibit operation of those same UAVs in the US.

That second front against DJI was opened by members of a House of Representatives committee that has declared de facto war on the world’s leading drone maker, based on thus far unsubstantiated claims its tech leaks user data to Chinese authorities. On Wednesday, those officials sent a letter to various Biden Administration agencies appealing to them to raise the current 25% fees on imports from China, which were first adopted by the Trump Administration. 

The objectivity behind the move is reflected in the very name of the congressional group making the call: the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. 

Its signatories are also, to a person, backers of the Countering CCP Drones Act and Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency (FACT) Act, whose objective is to simply ban the thousands, if not millions of enterprise and individual owners of DJI drones from using them in the US. Its method of doing so is to prohibit the Shenzhen-based company’s UAVs access to ubiquitous essential federal communications assets essential for their operation. 

Those bills cleared another administrative step on Wednesday toward eventual debate before the wider House. However, perhaps anticipating constitutional problems of the de facto prohibition of US drone operators to use their legally bought, freely available DJI drones – based on data leaking claims they’ve offered no evidence of, to boot – backers of the bills are hedging their bets. To do so, they’re seeking to further undermine the company’s blacklist-disrupted activity through stiffer tariffs.

Yet even then, the argument behind the appeal to the US Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Homeland Security, and US Trade Representative for raising tariffs on DJI imports relies on pure speculation. The increased duties are to be imposed, the letter noted, while authorities seek to “determine if (Chinese) firms are engaged in transshipment through Malaysia and other third-party countries.” 

The rush to mete out that sentence before an evidence-based verdict is delivered speaks volumes about larger protectionist motivations behind the wider DJI political blacklisting campaign it’s part of. So, too, is focusing the third country-import accusation on the company, rather than any of the the millions of other global firms that, theoretically, might be doing the same – but, theoretically, probably aren’t.

DJI’s success in capturing global and US markets with drones that consumers and enterprise users buy in greater numbers based on determination – it would logically seem – that they’re both lower priced and provide better, more effective onboard tech than American rivals is both well-established.

But because free, competition-enhancing market rules have allowed that to happen, House members now seek to reverse that result through coercive measures “to help protect US manufacturers in this critical industry,” as their own letter states.

Whether through legal measures to render operation of DJI drones in the US impossible, or increased tariffs to price them out of competition, the protectionist goals of past and ongoing US political offensives are evident from its partisans’ own stated desires. And those are, their letter says, to assist the “United States develop a commercially viable domestic drone industry” – something it apparently hasn’t been able to through usual competitive, free market rules that political cheaters now want to rig.