The U.S. Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors wants the service academy to partially reopen its iconic chapel ahead of schedule next year when it sheds the “big white box” that has enclosed it through years of renovations.
The idea is one of more than a dozen recommendations the board made in its semiannual report released Oct. 15, ahead of a planned Oct. 16 meeting.
The Cadet Chapel, designed by architect Walter Netsch Jr. and opened in 1962, is a National Historic Landmark, renowned for its use of tetrahedrons and its 17 spires. But it has been closed since 2019 for repairs due to leaks and water damage. Originally expected to cost $158 million and to be completed by 2023, renovation costs more than doubled to $335 million due to asbestos removal, among other problems, and the job won’t be finished until 2028.
The chapel has been enclosed in the “the box,” as cadets call it, for seven years. Locals and alums describe the scene as an “eyesore” and President Donald Trump has decried the troubled project, saying last October, “this mess should be investigated.”
At one point, officials feared the renovations wouldn’t be complete until spring 2029. But this summer, the Air Force Civil Engineer Center announced the box would start coming down in August 2027 and be fully deconstructed by January 2028. Chaplains will be allowed back in around April 2028, and the building will fully reopen to the public in August 2028. The news was hailed by local media.
USAFA’s Board of Visitors—a congressionally mandated oversight committee—called the new timeline “highly commendable,” but the board argues more can be done.
The board is “deeply concerned that the spiritual and character development of an entire generation of future officers is being compromised by the extended renovation timeline of the Cadet Chapel,” the report states. Members want to reopen the lower level of the chapel by December 2027, even as work continues on the upper level.
A white paper attached to the report makes the case that removing “the box”is a “strategic opportunity” to give cadets at least some access to the building, reorienting the eyesore to its spiritual purpose. To make that happen, the paper argues for:
- Accelerating the removal of the box by one month
- Prioritizing repairs and renovations for the lower level
- Creating “safe and isolated” access points for cadets to enter and exit the lower level
- Updating any legal and administrative frameworks to support the effort
The lower level of the building hosts Catholic and Jewish chapels, while the upper level has a Protestant chapel. The white paper argues that the lower chapels “can be dynamically time-shared” while the upper chapel is finished to “provide an immediate, centralized home for worship for all faith groups across the cadet wing.”
Assignments and Accreditation
Other Board of Visitors’ recommendations touch on USAFA’s role as an academic institution. One recommendation calls for the Air Force to “elevate the value” of an officer assignment to USAFA as a “career-enhancing duty” for Air Force and Space Force officers.
“While the Board fundamentally considers instructing and working at USAFA to be a premier developmental assignment, Career Field Managers are often reluctant to promote this duty,” the board report states. “Most positions at USAFA are not career-field-specific and therefore CFMs must ‘release’ officers to perform these duties. Career field management teams frequently view these releases as a ‘tax’ and perceive them negatively, as the individual is temporarily leaving their primary specialty.”
The issue is common to special duties such as recruiting, which also takes Airmen and Guardians out of their career field. To overcome the problem, the board wants the academy and Air Force Personnel Center to incentivize Academy duty by rewarding personnel who take USAFA assignments. They also recommend the Air Force examine promotion rates for officers who served as instructors to see whether the assignments improve or hurt career advancement.
More than 2,000 Airmen and Guardians work at USAFA, in jobs ranging from faculty to administration and support roles. In recent times, the number of uniformed faculty has grown as more military instructors have arrived in the wake of a rash of departures by civilian staff spurred by cuts to the federal workforce.
The exodus of civilian staff last year led one alumnus to file a complaint with the Higher Learning Commission, the academy’s accrediting institution. The complaint was settled without affecting the school’s accreditation. Meanwhile, the board report is calling for USAFA to sever its relationship with the HLC and instead join the other service academies and the Air Force’s other degree-granting institutions—including the Air Force Institute of Technology and Air University—to band together under a single accreditor.
A board working group favor joining the new Commission for Public Higher Education, founded by six states’ public university systems whose political leaders argue the new commission is needed to combat liberal bias and burdensome bureaucracy among current accreditors. The working group says CPHE “guarantees an apolitical baseline and alignment with requirements specific to the military education system.”
Previous Recommendations
The Board of Visitors is chaired Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), a former by former F-22 pilot and academy alumnus. The boarfd’s previous report, released in February, called for the academy to grow its cadet wing by 10 percent and build a new “tri-complex” of buildings to house a new “Air, Space, and Cyber Education Center,” including a new “home” base for the U.S. Space Force.
The bulk of the recommendations in that February report remain open, awaiting action from Congress. Decisions could come in the 2027 National Defense Authorization bill, but the measure remains stalled and will not be resolved until after the midterm elections.