President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Colorado’s mail-in voting policies were a “big factor” in his decision to relocate U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama.
Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress from Alabama, who stood beside Trump during an Oval Office announcement, insisted it was former President Joe Biden who politicized the basing process.
“This delegation has worked together, both chambers, both parties, to make sure that Huntsville was the place that Space Command called home,” Sen. Katie Britt said during the event. “Obviously, the Biden administration chose to make this political.”
The announcement is just the latest development in a yearslong back and forth about which of the two states should host the the military command, which is charged with operating the Defense Department’s space assets.
The headquarters has been provisionally based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, since 2019. In 2021, just as Trump was leaving office at the end of his first term, the White House announced Huntsville, Alabama, as its pick for the headquarters.
The decision sparked pushback from Colorado lawmakers, largely led by former Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., who called the Air Force’s selection process “fundamentally flawed.” A series of Government Accountability Office and DOD Inspector General reports followed, identifying issues with transparency and credibility in the Air Force’s basing process but concluded that the service followed the law in choosing Alabama.
Despite the conclusion of the watchdog investigations — and then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s support for relocating the command to Huntsville due to estimates that the move would save DOD $426 million — the White House announced in July 2023 that it had abandoned the first Trump administration’s decision and that Space Command would remain in Colorado.
Trump’s announcement that he would revert to his earlier, 2021 decision to base the command’s headquarters in Alabama was widely expected. However, his insistence Tuesday that the move was closely linked to Colorado’s embrace of mail-in voting — a major concern for the president — was not previously publicly identified as part of his administration’s justification.
More than once during the briefing he called Colorado’s policy of allowing voters to submit ballots by mail as “crooked” and claimed it influenced his decision.
“When the state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections,” Trump said. “That played a big factor.”
As president, Trump has been forward leaning on space policy. During his first term in 2019 he created the U.S. Space Force and reestablished Space Command as the 11th combatant command.
Later in the briefing, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-AL, indicated the new command would be named the “Donald J. Trump Space Command Center.”
The Space Force and Space Command deferred questions about the claim to Tuberville’s office. A spokesman for the senator said he “is exploring avenues to make that the official name.”
“Sen. Tuberville believes that naming U.S. Space Command headquarters after the guy who created Space Force and has brought Space Command back to life is more than appropriate,” the spokesperson told Defense News in an email.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
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