It’s no secret I’m a big fan of President Joe Biden. Despite lots of GOPers running down the state of the union these days, things are, in fact, not too bad and getting better. Recall please a certain orangish-colored former president used the stock market as his often-sole measure of economic wellbeing. Well, being is pretty good for the market these days. The S&P stock index is up 40% under Biden (it was up 13% at this point under Trump) and in spite of Trump’s assurance the markets would crash under Biden they are, in fact, way up, with the Dow closing over 40,000 for the first time ever.

But frankly, the markets are not great measures of how most folks are doing. It makes sense Trump would rely on the markets as indicators of overall wealth, due to his obsession with the richest Americans and not regular folks. But again, using the measure Trump said was best, Biden is kicking butt. And the global problem of inflation is better in the U.S. than most other places, unemployment is at record or near-record lows, and wages are rising. But don’t tell Fox News, as they must ignore actual facts because, you know, Trump.

But I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, I want to again come back to something Trump did, after he was defeated (fact check: Biden won), in the last few days of his presidency. In that dark time for the former reality TV star, he apparently was looking for ways to punish those who dared to oppose him, like, I dunno, Colorado. As a bluish-purple state, we had given our electoral votes to Biden.

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And so, Trump schemed for a bit of revenge and decided with about a week left in office, to order the move of U.S. Space Command from the existing multi-billion-dollar facilities it occupies in Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. Happily, he botched the orders a bit, and a week later he was out of office and his order was ultimately (and properly) rescinded, when Biden decided to keep things here in Colorado.

It’s no secret I, perhaps because I’m a retired 25-year Air Force officer and former ICBM launch officer, was opposed to the creation of Space Force in the first place. The Air Force was and is quite capable of handling the space mission without creating another huge bureaucratic military structure with a tiny number of personnel, roughly 8,600 military personnel. If you can fit an entire military organization into a single section of seats at Mile High, I have trouble believing it needs to be a separate service. I am a tad disappointed in President Biden for not rolling back the Space Force creation decision, but it appears that tiny force will be around for the long haul.

Now, you likely know about National Guard units in each state. Though the guard can be called up for national service (as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq) its members also do great and important things in their home states, under the command of the governor of said state. We often see the guard activated after natural disasters and they are great folks, with whom I often worked when I was on U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s staff.

A recent Colorado Politics story ties together issues around the Space Force and the National Guard. Apparently, the Air Force planned to transfer a number of state guard units from Air Force affiliation to the Space Force, due to those units primary functions being connected to space operations. This effort was apparently not well vetted, and all 50 state governors objected to the plan. Anything that gets Jared Polis and Ron DeSantis on the same page must be a remarkable issue.

Not surprisingly, Congress is taking action. The House Armed Services Committee has approved legislative language that will require consultation between the Air Force and the governors of the states involved before any actual transfer takes place.

Our own terrific House member Jason Crow (full disclosure: an old friend of mine) is working on the issue hard, crafting a letter to the DOD that already has 85 co-signers. Why? Well, seven of the fourteen units that would be impacted are in Colorado, which isn’t a surprise, as we are the heart of space operations for the U.S. military.

There are several proposals in the works, and it may make sense (assuming Space Force is going to stick around) to transfer some and heck, maybe all of the units in question, but it was foolish of the AF to think they could just issue orders moving about units that spend most of their time under gubernatorial control.

Happily, it appears the brakes have been applied, and the process with get a more thorough vetting. We may well end up with said units becoming part of the Space Force, but it will be after governors get their say regarding units they nominally at least control, and that’s a good thing.

We’ll see what happens, stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.