President-elect Donald Trump is likely to overturn a decision to permanently place U.S. Space Command in Colorado and move it to Alabama -- where Trump originally wanted it -- during his first week in office, the House Armed Services Committee chairman said Monday.
On July 31, 2023, President Joe Biden's administration announced that Space Command would keep its headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado -- reversing Trump's announcement in 2021, which would have moved it to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., told a Mobile, Alabama, radio station on Monday that Trump had vowed to reverse the decision on the campaign trail and said the president-elect will make good on that promise in short order.
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"I think you'll see in the first week that he's in office, he'll sign an executive order reversing Biden's directive," Rogers told the radio hosts. "And we will start construction next year in Huntsville."
Trump's original decision to place Space Command -- the combatant command tasked with military operations in space that was reactivated in 2019 -- in Alabama was made in the waning days of his first term and immediately sparked backlash from Colorado lawmakers, who requested a Government Accountability Office report as well as a Department of Defense inspector general probe.
In May 2022, the inspector general probe said that, while the selection process was marred by shoddy recordkeeping, the ultimate decision to choose Huntsville was reasonable. And in June 2022, the Government Accountability Office found that Space Command's move from Colorado to Alabama was driven by an unorganized and unclear process that raised concerns about "significant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility," as well as the "appearance of bias" in the decision.
Once Biden announced that Space Command would be permanently based in Colorado Springs -- it had been temporarily housed at Peterson Space Force Base in the state -- Rogers quickly pushed back by calling for new GAO and DoD inspector general investigations.
Rogers said on the talk show that those probes should be finished in the coming months.
"I have every confidence that those investigations, when they're finished probably in December or January, are going to say there was no reason for it not to go to Huntsville, and would have reversed the president's decision anyway," Rogers said.
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., in a statement posted Tuesday on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, vowed to fight for Space Command to remain in his state.
"Colorado is the rightful home for U.S. Space Command," Bennet wrote. "Our state's space and military assets are critical to America's national security, and Colorado is the best place for our service members and their families to train, live, work and retire."
The partisan battle over Space Command's headquarters decision left military families and service members in limbo, Military.com previously reported.
Military.com also first reported that the issue of abortion, following the Supreme Court decision in 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade, was also a major concern among Colorado lawmakers who feared that service members' reproductive rights would be limited by moving from their state, where abortion access is unrestricted, to Alabama, where it is illegal with limited exceptions.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on space policy, told Military.com in an interview Tuesday that Trump reversing the decision is "near certain," especially because Republicans are likely on the brink of controlling both the House and the Senate.
"It's going to require military construction appropriations and the authorization from Congress, but with Republicans in control of both chambers, and we're talking about moving a headquarters from a blue state to a red state, it seems pretty likely that's going to happen," Harrison said.
There have been numerous partisan fights in Congress related to the military's space operations, including the ongoing argument over whether to create a Space National Guard -- a position that Trump supports and one that the outgoing Biden administration opposed.
Harrison added that it's possible, if Democrats regain control of both chambers of Congress in two years, they could potentially halt the Space Command construction, although it won't be easy to justify.
"I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to start," he said of the construction. "In two years it is entirely possible that we could see both the House and the Senate flip to Democratic control, in which case they could, in theory, put the brakes on the move and stop construction. It becomes more and more difficult and more wasteful to do that, the faster the construction is able to move forward."
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