Michigan Pushes Sweeping Drone Legislation Package Through State Legislature

Michigan just became the most interesting state in the country for drones. The House passed a 15-bill package called SHIELD — Securing Homeland and Infrastructure with Emerging Laws for Drones — that does two things no state has dared attempt at this scale: it lets the Michigan Department of Transportation build aerial mobility corridors for commercial delivery drones, and it authorizes state and local police to disable or destroy drones they deem a threat. Both moves are designed to test the outer edge of what a state can do without running into federal preemption. Both are riding a wave that Congress itself created.

The package, sponsored chiefly by Representative William Bruck, a Republican who chairs the Homeland Security and Foreign Influence subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, cleared the House with 12 primary sponsors split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Bruck told DRONELIFE he is confident the Senate will take it up in April and that he expects the package signed into law by late summer. The pitch is simple: the federal government has laid groundwork, and Michigan is cashing in the chips.

"We did very well to avoid a federal pre-emption situation by adding a couple phrases here and there and making sure while we were pushing the envelope obviously, we were not pushing past some hard lines," Bruck said.

Those hard lines are what makes this worth watching. The bill most likely to test the preemption boundary would give non-federal law enforcement officers the authority to disable or destroy drones posing a credible threat — the kind of authority that has historically belonged to the federal government alone. Bruck points to the Safer Skies Act, which Congress passed in December as part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, as his legal air cover. The Act authorizes trained and certified state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement to disrupt drones posing a credible threat to public safety, large events, critical infrastructure, and correctional facilities.

There is a catch, and it is a significant one. The Safer Skies Act establishes the framework, but the actual federal rulemaking to implement it is not finished. Until those rules land, SLTT agencies cannot independently deploy counter-drone mitigation technologies — they currently operate under FBI task force deputization. Michigan bill is, in effect, a bet that the federal rules will land where the state wants them.

The second headline piece is infrastructure. The Michigan Department of Transportation Aeronautics Division would be empowered to establish aerial mobility corridors — specifically to accommodate Amazon and Walmart delivery drones that are already operating in limited corridors in other parts of the country. MDOT would also maintain a state-level database of commercially operated drones, accessible to law enforcement. Bruck frames this as Michigan getting ahead of a logistical frontier before it arrives. "That needs to expand," he said, "but we need to be balancing that with security and safety of the population and our critical infrastructure."

The package also includes a ban on state agencies purchasing drones or equipment from companies on the Defense Department list of firms with significant ties to the Chinese military — House Bill 5328, introduced in December — and restrictions on drone flights over law enforcement facilities, correctional institutions, and critical infrastructure like power plants and data centers. Trespassing laws would be extended to cover drone overflights over private property used in ways that interfere with residents privacy.