The House Armed Services Committee has voted to yet again change the names of nine Army bases originally named for Confederate generals.
It did so by adding an amendment the annual defense funding bill, which still needs the approval of the full House and Senate.
If it does become law, that would mean a third name change for the bases in recent years.
In 2020, Congress ordered the Confederate names removed, then overrode a veto from President Trump.
A federal renaming commission then began a lengthy process that leaned heavily on input from the base communities before recommending new names, which were adopted in 2023.
But last year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth changed them back, getting around the law by saying the bases now honored other people with the same names as the Confederate generals.
For instance, the Pentagon said Fort Bragg, N.C. - which was originally named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg - now honors Private Roland L. Bragg of Maine, a World War II hero who was awarded the Silver Star for valor and a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.
Similarly, the Pentagon said Fort Lee in Virginia, initially named for Robert E. Lee, now honors Private Fitz Lee, a Spanish–American War veteran.
Democrats and some Republicans in Congress have called Hegseth's approach a cynical ploy to circumvent the will of Congress, citing the fact that President Trump had repeatedly vowed to restore the name "Bragg." And later, after Hegseth's changes, Trump flatly said Fort Lee is once again bearing the name of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Other affected bases are Fort Benning and Fort Gordon, Georgia; Fort Pickett and Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia; Fort Polk, Louisiana; Fort Hood, Texas; and Fort Rucker, Alabama.
In the debate before the recent House Armed Services Committee vote to reverse Hegseth's decision, several members said the matter should have been settled with the bipartisan 2020 law.
Rep. Marilyn Strickland, a Washington Democrat who proposed the amendment to revert to the non-Confederate names, said Congress had been clear it did not want the names of men who fought against the nation to defend slavery to grace its military bases.
"This committee put in the work to correct this injustice, and a bipartisan naming commission followed with extensive community engagement, site visits, congressional briefings, and deliberation," she said. "This commission specifically considered and rejected the idea of simply finding different service members with the same last names as the Confederate officers being removed, and that detail matters, because what happened next goes directly to the integrity of the process that Congress established."
Some GOP committee members like Pat Fallon of Texas, though, questioned whether it was right to remove Confederate names in the first place, and he asserted that doing so was an attempted to erase history.
"To judge historical figures by the morality of our time is taking certain things out of context," Fallon said, "I just heard you can't honor our forefathers that enslaved other people. Okay, are we going to rename this city? Because where does it end? Are we going to dynamite a couple of faces off of Mount Rushmore?"
Rep. Gil Cisneros, a California Democrat, disagreed.
"I'll give him the point, right, that we don't want to judge people by different times, but the big difference between Washington and Jefferson, and Hood and Bragg and Lee, is Washington and Jefferson fought for this country to make it an independent nation, where the other three fought against it," said Cisneros.
Maryland Democrat Sarah Elfreth said the amendment wasn't about erasing history.
"I think that's a big misunderstanding about the exercise here," she said. "It's choosing which history we elevate, which history we celebrate, and telling the whole story of this country."
North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan, a former Special Forces officer who served at Fort Bragg, said he would not support naming bases for White supremacists but he didn't believe that's what the military did.
Harrigan said removing the longstanding names breaks a line of continuity between older veterans and current soldiers.
"When that service member says, 'I serve at Fort Cavazos,' an honorable name, certainly, those veterans have absolutely no idea what that current service member is talking about," Harrigan said, referring to Fort Hood, Texas, which briefly was renamed to honor Richard Cavazos, the Army's first Hispanic four-star general.
"You have now broken that common experience that across our nation served our nation so well for so many decades, centuries, even for some of these names," Harrigan said.
He said the name Fort Liberty confuses people, including foreign leaders, whereas Fort Bragg is widely known.
"It's incredibly important, because when you come in and you have to say, 'Well, I was at Fort Liberty,' their honest question to you is, 'Where the four-letter-word is that?'"
Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican, was the only elected official on the naming commission. He said he's resigned to the Confederate names remaining in place. For now.
"I know that the names are not going to change under the current administration," Scott said. "And I also know that these current names will not stand the test of time."
The Republican-majority committee voted 29 to 27 for the amendment to change the names. Two Republicans - Don Bacon of Nebraska and Carlos Gimenez of Florida - joined Democrats in supporting the amendment.
Each of the two previous name changes cost the Pentagon millions of dollars in everything from signage to software. North Carolina's Department of Transportation spent more than $160,000 modifying highway signs for the Bragg-to-Liberty switch, then an estimated $200,000 to change things back.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
