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Geofencing is practical with participating manufacturers and users; you could use it to keep every fool who just got back from Best Buy with a new drone from flying it over the nearby airport, military base, whatever. It doesn't do anything against intentional bad actors, because the geofencing can be removed (as it often was when DJI was doing it) or if they manage to lock that down completely the flight controller completely replaced with one you can run open-source software on (as many do). And there is even a flight controller which can accept open source software which is (allegedly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fraud) made in the US, so the recent ban wouldn't even make bad actors smuggle.
Honestly it's just a few engineer-months of work to spit out a prototype of such a thing, and I'm well aware of similar hobby projects. What you're asking for can also be produced pretty easily domestically (there are domestic PCB vendors and contractors that will place and solder parts, or just do it by hand). Whether anyone is actually is making it in the US a separate question.
ETA: The designs for such a controller are probably already on GitHub somewhere, to be honest.
These things CAN be produced domestically, but it can't be done economically, so there won't be large numbers of hobbyists any more. It is also likely the DHS and DoD expect to be able to lean on any domestic manufacturers to refuse to produce these, or to nerf them in some way.
I would be very surprised if OSHPark could figure out the use of a printed circuit board design from just the layout files you send them. They don't need a parts list or schematic. Sure, a lot of PCBs have text on them, but I've sent lots of PCBs out for fabrication with just part reference designators, design ID number, and maybe company name on them. Then send your parts order off to Mouser or DigiKey, and the parts list for a simple flight controller look a lot like pretty much any other project these days: a microcontroller, accelerometer chips, GPS parts, motor drivers -- none of those are out of place going into a car, wristwatch, cell phone, or anything else these days even if you do order them all at once. Sure, you'd like a tactical grade IMU and a better GPS receiver but those were out of your budget anyway and do get you put on a list (for existing EAR/ITAR reasons). Then put it together with a soldering iron. All in, you could probably manage something functional to drive a quadrotor for a couple hundred bucks.
It'd be hard to prevent folks from putting those parts together without kneecapping a bunch of US industry that is currently wrestling with tariff-induced redesigns ("can you make it cheaper now with non-Chinese parts?"). Quadrotor (and even fixed-wing) control is just not a particularly difficult problem in 2025 (nor was it really a decade ago).
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Making your own drone hardware is trivial. A high schooler could do it as a science fair project. Even if you had Shenzhen make the PCB, customs has no idea it's "drone hardware."
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