Congressional watchdog ‘expects’ to open new investigation of SPACECOM basing choice

WASHINGTON — At the request of Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is likely to open yet another investigation into White House and Defense Department decision-making that led to President Joe Biden’s declaration last month that Space Command’s permanent headquarters will be in Colorado.

“It still has to go through our formal review process, but yes, we expect to accept it,” Chuck Young, GAO’s managing director for public affairs, told Breaking Defense in an email regarding Rogers’ review request. “It’s too early to say how long it will last.”

Rogers’ made the request in a letter today to GAO, asking seven questions about the circumstances surrounding Biden’s move to overturn the last-minute decision by then-President Donald Trump in January 2021 to move the HQ from its temporary home at Peterson SFB in Colorado Springs to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. Rogers’ inquiry includes questions about the role of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and outgoing SPACECOM head Gen. Jim Dickinson in the process. Inside Defense was first to report the GAO’s likely acceptance of Rogers’ request.

Rogers also intends to hold a public hearing on the issue, likely sometime next month, as part of the congressional investigation into the basing decision he opened in May — announcing on Tuesday that he has asked Kendall, Dickinson and Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman to testify.

Rogers and other Alabama Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Tommy Tuberville, have accused Biden of playing politics with the decision, based in part on the state’s restrictive abortion ban.

Trump’s decision, however, also was controversial and the subject of investigations both by GAO and the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Neither of those reviews found the Alabama choice to be “unreasonable,” although both questioned the fullness and transparency of the basing review.

Meanwhile, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall on Tuesday sent a letter to the OIG asking it to also investigate the decision, alleging that Dickinson had flip-flopped on the question by first supporting Redstone and then arguing for Peterson. Marshall also claimed that the Biden administration has been targeting “red states.”

An OIG spokesperson told Breaking Defense the office had received the letter and “are reviewing it.”

Peterson has been the preferred choice of the top military space brass, including Dickinson, ever since the basing process began way back in 2018. Trump’s choice of Huntsville was made over their “best military judgement” that moving SPACECOM from its current Colorado home — for decades that of the now defunct Air Force Space Command — would needless delay its full operational capability.

That said, both the GAO and OIG inspections found that Huntsville had come out first in the formal basing review based on the Air Force’s initial metrics-based evaluation.