President Joe Biden has decided to keep U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado, overturning a last-ditch decision by the Trump administration to move it to Alabama and ending months of politically fueled debate, according to senior U.S. officials.
The officials said Biden was convinced by the head of Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson, who argued that moving his headquarters now would jeopardize military readiness. Dickinson’s view, however, was in contrast to Air Force leadership, who studied the issue at length and determined that relocating to Huntsville, Alabama, was the right move.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the decision ahead of the announcement.
The president, they said, believes that keeping the command in Colorado Springs would avoid a disruption in readiness that the move would cause, particularly as the U.S. races to compete with China in space. And they said Biden firmly believes that maintaining stability will help the military be better able to respond in space over the next decade. Those factors, they said, outweighed what the president believed would be any minor benefits of moving to Alabama.
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I honestly do absolutely support taking tax dollars from those states, because they’re using them to undermine and delegitimize our democracy. Take a map of the states that deny voting rights to former prisoners in perpetuity and you’ll be pretty close to a map of the states that draw the most financial support. These states push out minority voters or disenfranchise them with antisocial and discriminatory laws and policies, then use their abuse of the system to secure a disproportionate level of representation.
Things on the national level won’t improve as long as we’re letting all these red states take advantage of the system.