Hill battle over SPACECOM HQ seeps into Pentagon’s annual $4.1B reprogramming request

WASHINGTON — The long-burning battle on Capitol Hill over whether to base US Space Command headquarters in Colorado or Alabama has spilled into congressional deliberations on the Pentagon’s annual request to reprogram current year funds — with a group of Colorado lawmakers accusing House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers of holding up $4.1 billion to force a decision.

“Congressman Mike Rogers has decided to not approve hundreds of millions of dollars for our service members and our nation’s most vital defense programs. This is outrageous. This legislative hostage-taking is unconscionable and must stop,” the Colorado delegation, led by Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, said in a press release today. They were joined by Colorado representatives, Joe Neguse, Diana DeGette, Brittany Pettersen, Yadira Caraveo, and Jason Crow, all Democrats.

Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, shot back in a statement to Breaking Defense: “It’s unfortunate that the Junior Senator from Colorado chose to release a partisan, parochial, and untrue misrepresentation of HASC processes. The Committee is continuing to review reprogramming requests from the Department of Defense.”

The funds in question are essentially monies that the Defense Department wants to move around from one program to another deemed more urgent — something that happens every year because DoD budget requests happen nearly a year before funds can be spent. Rogers has yet to approve the pending DoD reprogramming requests — which the Colorado Democrats say “appears to be an effort to pressure” the Air Fore to make a call on SPACECOM’s home.

In the space arena, there are a couple of such reprogramming requests from the Department of the Air Force, which provides civilian (i.e. policy and acquisition) oversight of the Space Force:

The Space Development Agency wants to add $108 million to its fiscal 2023 request of $746 million for Resilient Missile Warning/Tracking satellites, more commonly called the Tracking Layer of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, to launch a set of satellites to cover the Indo-Pacific theater in early 2026.

The Space Force also has asked to reprogram a relatively paltry $1.35 million to the service’s Front Door — an effort to create a one-stop shop, via an online portal, to engage with innovative commercial industry partners that do not have expertise in the Byzantine ways of space acquisition.

The January 2021 basing decision by President Donald Trump, which disregarded the Air Force’s top choice of Colorado Springs, has led to a bitter, and still raging, public debate between the Colorado and Alabama congressional delegations — despite the fact that investigations by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon Office of the Inspector General found that the choice to base SPACECOM HQ at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., reasonable, even if the process lacked discipline. Since that time, the Department of the Air Force has been reconsidering which way to jump.

Frustrated that Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has still not announced the location for the SPACECOM headquarters, both House authorizers in their version of the National Defense Authorization Act would block fiscal 2024 funds for facility modification or construction for SPACECOM of the until he confirms its permanent home measure House appropriators would also enforce in their FY24 spending bill.