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Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Sunday that the United States would be able to use planned defense facilities in Western Australia to help deliver submarines under the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal.

The government on Saturday said it would spend A$12 billion to upgrade facilities at the Henderson shipyard near Perth, as part of a 20-year plan to transform it into the maintenance hub for its AUKUS submarine fleet.

The AUKUS pact, agreed upon by Australia, Britain and the US in 2021, aims to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines from the next decade to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region. President Donald Trump’s administration is undertaking a formal review of the pact.
When asked on Sunday if the US would be able to use dry docks at the facility for its nuclear-powered submarines, Marles said “this is an AUKUS facility and so I would expect so.”
“This is about being able to sustain and maintain Australia’s future submarines but it is very much a facility that is being built in the context of AUKUS,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation television. “I would expect that in the future this would be available to the US.”

The center-left Labor government made an initial investment of A$127 million last year to upgrade facilities at the shipyard, which will also build the new landing craft for the Australian army and the new general-purpose frigates for the navy, supporting around 10,000 local jobs.

Under AUKUS — worth hundreds of billions of dollars — Washington will sell several Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, while Britain and Australia will later build a new AUKUS-class submarine.

The Republican and Democratic heads of a US congressional committee for strategic competition with China in July stressed their strong support for AUKUS, amid the review of the deal by Elbridge Colby, a top Pentagon policy official and public critic of the pact.

Australia, which the same month signed a treaty with Britain to bolster cooperation over the next 50 years on AUKUS, has maintained it is confident the pact will proceed.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that US President Donald Trump’s administration had unlawfully directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, but the judge did not order their reinstatement, citing recent US Supreme Court decisions.
US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco stuck by his preliminary conclusion in the case that the US Office of Personnel Management in February unlawfully ordered numerous agencies to fire probationary employees en masse.
Unions, nonprofits and Washington State sued after Trump’s administration moved to fire roughly 25,000 probationary employees, who typically have less than a year of service, though some are longtime workers in new jobs.
Alsup said ordinarily he would “set aside OPM’s unlawful directive and unwind its consequences, returning the parties to the ex ante status quo, and as a consequence, probationers to their posts.”
“But the Supreme Court has made clear enough by way of its emergency docket that it will overrule judicially granted relief respecting hirings and firings within the executive, not just in this case but in others,” Alsup wrote.
In April, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction Alsup issued in the case requiring six agencies to reinstate 17,000 employees while the litigation moved forward.
Alsup said too much had happened since the Supreme Court’s April decision for him to order employees to be reinstated now, as many had gotten new jobs while the administration transformed the government.
But Alsup, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the workers “nevertheless continue to be harmed by OPM’s pretextual termination ‘for performance,’ and that harm can be redressed without reinstatement.”
He ordered 19 agencies, including the US Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Treasury, to update the employees’ files by November 14 and barred them from following OPM directives to fire workers.
Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Government Employees’ national president, in a statement said Alsup’s ruling “makes clear that thousands of probationary workers were wrongfully fired, exposes the sham record the government relied upon, and requires the government to tell the wrongly terminated employees that OPM’s reasoning for firing them was false.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.