President-elect Donald Trump is likely to reverse the decision to permanently place the US Space Command in Colorado and move it to Alabama — where Trump originally wanted it — during his first week in office, the chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services of the Chamber.

On July 31, 2023, President Joe Biden’s administration announced that the Space Command would retain its headquarters at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado — reversing Trump’s 2021 announcement that would have moved it Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., he told a Mobile, Ala., radio station Monday that Trump promised to reverse the decision on the campaign trail and said the president-elect would follow through on that promise shortly.

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“I think you’re going to see that within the first week that he’s in office, he’s going to sign an executive order that overturns Biden’s directive,” Rogers told the radio hosts. “And we’ll start construction next year in Huntsville.”

Trump’s initial 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 final days of his first term and drew immediate backlash from lawmakers in Colorado, who called for government accountability. The bureau’s report, as well as an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Defense.

In May 2022, the inspector general stated that while the selection process was marred by a poor record, the final decision to choose Huntsville was reasonable. And in June 2022, the Government Accountability Office found that the move of Space Command from Colorado to Alabama was prompted by a disorganized and unclear process that raised concerns about “significant deficiencies in its transparency and credibility” as well as “the emergence of a biases’ in the decision.

Once Biden announced that the Space Command would be permanently based in Colorado Springs — it was temporarily housed at the state’s Peterson Space Force Base — Rogers quickly pushed back, calling for new investigations by the GAO and DoD inspectors general.

Rogers said on the talk show that those probes should be completed in the coming months.

“I have every confidence that those investigations, when they’re done probably in December or January, they’re going to say there’s no reason not to go to Huntsville and they would have overturned the president’s decision anyway,” Rogers said.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., in a statement posted Tuesday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, vowed to fight to keep Space Command in his state.

“Colorado is the legal home of the US 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 the Space Command headquarters decision has left military families and service members in limbo, Military.com previously reported.

Military.com also first reported that the abortion issuefollowing the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, was also a major concern among Colorado lawmakers, who feared that the reproductive rights of military service members would be limited by moving from their state, where access to abortion 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’s reversal is “almost certain,” especially since Republicans are likely on the verge of controlling both Chamber, as well as the Senate.

“It’s going to require military construction appropriations and congressional authorization, but with Republicans in control of both chambers and 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 battles in Congress related to military space operations, including the ongoing argument over creating a space. National Guard — a position that Trump supports and one that the Biden administration has opposed.

Harrison added that it’s possible, if Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress in two years, they could stop construction of the Space Command, though it won’t be easy to justify.

“I think it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s going to start,” he said of construction. “In two years it’s entirely possible we’ll see both the House and Senate shift to Democratic control, in which case they could theoretically put the brakes on and stop construction. It becomes more and more difficult. wasteful to do so, the faster construction can move forward.”

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