Counter-drone protection is now in place at all 78 US-hosted matches of the 2026 World Cup, plus one fan fest in every host city for the tournament's duration. The claim comes from Andrew Giuliani, who heads the White House World Cup Task Force, speaking to ABC News on 16 June. Mitigation includes jamming a drone so it drops out of the sky; the FBI has already seized 35 recreational drones near venues in Miami and Atlanta.
The authority story sits underneath the coverage story. Counter-UAS powers in the US are tightly held federally. Open-source reporting indicates the SAFER SKIES Act, enacted within the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, expanded the legal pathways for state, local, tribal and territorial agencies to take part in counter-drone operations under set conditions. The mechanism is deputisation: officers trained through the FBI's National Counter-UAS Training Center are granted federal authority for that limited purpose. The constraint is throughput — the centre trains only small classes at a time, which practitioners have called too slow to scale.
The money. Open-source reporting describes a federal counter-drone grant programme of roughly $500m in total, of which the first $250m has been released to host states, with a further tranche expected in a later fiscal year. FEMA allocated a $250m counter-drone tranche to the 11 US host states and Washington DC.
The operator implication. Two things matter for protective teams working near venues. First, temporary flight restrictions are real and enforced — at one Dallas-area stadium a three-nautical-mile no-drone radius up to 3,000 feet applies for three hours either side of a match, with penalties running to a six-figure fine and prison. Brief drivers and advance teams on the venue-specific TFRs, not a generic assumption. Second, the deputisation-and-train model being stood up here is the template that will define how counter-drone authority is shared with local agencies long after the final whistle.
