DENVER (AP) – The Department of Defense’s inspector general announced Friday that he is reviewing the Trump administration’s last minute move to relocate the U.S. space order from Colorado to Alabama.
The January 13 decision, one week before Trump left office, blinded Colorado officials and raised questions about political retaliation. Trump announced at a meeting in Colorado in 2020 that the order would remain at the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
But the man with whom Trump held the rally, Republican Senator Cory Gardner, lost his re-election bid in November, and Colorado, unlike Alabama, voted decisively against Trump. The air force’s last relocation of command headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama – home of the U.S. Army Redstone Arsenal – blinded Colorado officials from both parties, urging the Biden government to reconsider the decision.
The Office of the Inspector General announced on Friday that it is investigating whether the resettlement complies with Air Force and Pentagon policies and is based on proper evaluations of competing locations.
Colorado officials from both parties were delighted. “It is imperative that we thoroughly review what I believe will be a fundamentally flawed process that focuses on bean counting rather than American domination of space,” Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican whose district includes the Space Command, said.
The state’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, also applauded the investigation. “The moving space order will disrupt the mission while endangering our national security and economic viability,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Politics plays no role in our national security. We fully support the investigation. ”
The Space Command enables, among other things, satellite-based navigation and troop communication and provides alert for rocket launches. Also on Peterson are the North American Aviation Defense Order, or NORAD, and the American North Order.
The Space Command differs from the U.S. Space Force, which launched in December 2019 as the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947. The Space Command is not an individual military service, but a central command for military space operations. That was from 1985 until Peterson was dissolved, and it was revived in 2019.
The Air Force accepted the recommendations of the mission when it was revived and considered six finalists, including Huntsville, when Trump indicated he would stay in Colorado Springs.