“He has targeted the people of Colorado in the same way he’s targeted the people of New York, New Jersey and Virginia — and other places that have voters who did not support him,” Jeffries told a group of journalists during a Denver visit. “This is a level of … retributive behavior that should not come from people in high office, because the American people are the ones who we should center in our efforts — and not divide them according to red states, blue states or purple states.”

Jefferies, of New York, is in line to take the speaker’s gavel if Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives in November. He was in Colorado to raise money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and to support Democratic candidates Manny Rutinel and Jessica Killin in their quests to flip two Republican-held seats in the state — those occupied by U.S. Reps. Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank, respectively.

He made his remarks after meeting with the Black Ministerial Alliance in Denver.

Since Trump returned to office last year, his administration has denied major Colorado disaster relief requests, though he approved a separate request for this year’s Gold Mountain and Aspen Acres fires earlier this month. He’s also sought to dismantle a nationally recognized climate lab in Boulder and to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama. He’s for large grant funding cuts, attempted to force the state 100,000 low-income people who receive food benefits and vetoed legislation that would have brought clean water to rural parts of the state.

Much of that happened as Trump repeatedly lashed out at Gov. Jared Polis for not pardoning Tina Peters, the disgraced former county clerk who was convicted of election-related felonies.

Polis, a Democrat, later granted Peters a commutation and ordered her released early, though he denied his decision had anything to do with pressure from the Trump administration.

In August, an email surfaced in court that appeared to show Colorado was singled out when Trump officials met “to prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities.” The email was sent in December, at the height of Trump’s public furor over Peters’ imprisonment.

Opponents characterized the email as a “smoking gun” in a lawsuit over the administration’s campaign against Colorado.

Regarding potential investigative actions by a Democratic-majority House next year, Jefferies deferred to members who sit on the House Judiciary Committee, including U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Lafayette — who appeared with him at Wednesday’s event — and the House oversight committee. He said they “haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out” in terms of actions a potential Democratic majority might take.

Instead, he said his focus was on affordability and other Democratic priorities.

“We’re going to follow the facts, we’re going to apply the law, we’re going to be guided by the Constitution and we’re going to let the chips fall where they may, in terms of conducting the oversight that is part of being a separate and coequal branch of government.”

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My first full day at work as a United States Senator was January 6th. A few days later, we unexpectedly learned that after a secretive Oval Office meeting, Trump had decided to move U.S. Space Command from its historical headquarters in Republican-leaning Colorado Springs to Alabama.

That was just the beginning.

In the years that followed, President Trump’s anger toward Colorado only grew. After the Colorado Supreme Court determined in 2023 that he had engaged in insurrection and was therefore disqualified from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, he lashed out at the ruling.

Then, after former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was rightfully convicted by a jury of her peers for undermining Colorado’s free and fair election system, President Trump embraced her. To most Coloradans, Peters was and is a disgrace. To Trump, she was a martyr.

Upon taking office again, President Trump reversed the Biden administration’s permanent basing decision, ordering the fully operational Space Command to relocate to Alabama, threatening thousands of jobs and our military readiness. His administration denied disaster assistance to Colorado communities rebuilding from wildfires and floods. He even vetoed bipartisan legislation to bring clean drinking water to 39 southeastern Colorado communities.

His administration has also moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, and canceled more than $100 million in transportation grants and hundreds of millions in clean energy investments. They froze funding for child care, food assistance, and other services for vulnerable families. The EPA overrode Colorado’s regional haze plan, undermining years of state-led work to reduce pollution. The list goes on and on.

We now know that these relentless attacks weren’t merely coincidence. Last week, an email disclosed in court revealed that officials at the highest levels of the White House were directed to orchestrate political retribution against Coloradans.

I’ve called for an investigation into the administration’s targeting of our state. Our country needs to fully understand how federal resources were manipulated to punish innocent Coloradans, both Republicans and Democrats. Government resources belong to the American people. They are not weapons to wield against the president����ap enemies.

Coloradans are already struggling with the cost of groceries, housing, health care, and other essentials. All across Colorado, families, farmers, and small business owners are struggling to stay afloat. But instead of lowering prices, President Trump and his allies are misusing federal power and putting political priorities ahead of the public interest. We’re fighting back.

When President Trump proposed a Department of Justice fund to compensate election criminals like Tina Peters and those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, we led the opposition against it. When Republicans proposed selling up to three million acres of public lands across Colorado and ten other Western states to the highest bidder, we rallied lawmakers from across the aisle to defeat it. When critical weather and climate science was under attack, we held up an appropriations package for weeks over efforts to close NCAR and worked with Democrats and Republicans to protect the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) access to critical weather data.

There’s no shortage of pressing problems to fix: the cost-of-living emergency, runaway healthcare costs, and mass deportations that are inflicting terror. These challenges require pragmatic solutions, not grinding political axes. The White House’s continued fixation on the 2020 election, Tina Peters, and indeed the state of Colorado, isn’t getting us any closer to addressing them.

Coloradans shouldn’t pay the price for the petty grievances and failed policies that make their lives harder. We need to continue holding this administration accountable, fighting back against the president����ap attacks on Colorado, and lowering costs for working families.

John Hickenlooper is a U.S. Senator representing Colorado.

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In a , Peters said David Warrington, President Donald Trump’s White House counsel, had worked “with the administration, (Gov. Jared) Polis, for my release.”

It’s unclear what exact role Warrington played in Peters’ release. Her attorney said the White House counsel “helped with communications” with Polis.

Polis’ office would not directly respond to multiple requests for comment about whether the governor had communicated with Warrington or Trump about the former clerk before ordering her released on June 1. An attorney for the state said Polis’ office had no records that mention Warrington.

“I believe there were communications between Donald Trump and his office and Gov. Polis,” Peter Ticktin, Peters’ lawyer, told The Denver Post this week. He said he believed those conversations were about Peters “because Donald Trump wanted to see her released.”

The White House, which did not return a request for comment for this story, announced this month that .

Since he commuted her sentence in May, Polis has been repeatedly accused of bowing to a public pressure campaign mounted by Trump — an allegation the governor has denied. Polis has said he commuted the remainder of Peters’ eight-and-a-half-year sentence in May because it was too harsh, and he has pointed to an April appeals court ruling that found her sentence was partly motivated by speech protected by the First Amendment.

“The governor has said before that the president only made doing the right thing harder by making an illegal pardon and repeatedly tweeting — or Truthing — his opinion,” Polis spokeswoman Ally Sullivan said in a statement for this story, referring to Trump’s Truth Social platform. She added: “The governor independently and thoroughly reviewed this case and the president����ap request had no bearing on the governor’s decision other than making it more challenging.”

Polis’ office has been serially cagey about his conversations with Trump, who frequently and publicly vented his Peters-related displeasure directly at the governor. Polis would not directly respond to several questions about Peters and Trump in January, though he did say he had not discussed releasing Peters as part of a deal with the federal government.

In May, Polis that he’d spoken with Trump last year about the former clerk, who had become an icon among election conspiracists after she was convicted for her role in an election misconduct scheme in Mesa County.

But after The Post reported that Trump administration officials had convened a meeting to take action against Colorado amid Trump’s fury over Peters last year, Polis’ office has refused to say when Polis and Trump spoke or whether the president had threatened the state during those conversations.

In a follow-up statement Thursday, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama again did not directly respond to The Post’s questions about Warrington or the governor’s conversations with Trump. He said the governor’s office “can’t speak to the motivations of the White House or any recent comments by third parties on the governor’s clemency decision,” and he lamented that the case had been “politicized.”

Ticktin, Peters’ lawyer, declined to describe the nature of the White House’s communications with Polis. Peters’ podcast comments were

“Anything that was said to me would’ve been said in confidence,” Ticktin said. “Because don’t forget, I am an attorney. The one thing that we don’t do is gossip or spread the word.”

But Ticktin said Polis had rejected requests from the president and federal government; the state had refused to transfer Peters into federal custody late last year, for instance, and did not commute Peters’ sentence until months after the fall conversation with Trump. Hypothetically, Ticktin continued, “two people can have a conversation and don’t agree, and one won’t kowtow to the other, and ultimately decides to do the right thing. That����ap pretty well what happened here.”

In an interview with last month, Polis said that, “from my perspective,” Peters’ release was not part of a deal with the Trump administration. He had repeatedly hinted at commuting her sentence in the months before her release, and other state officials first began to fear he would do so late last year.

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has alleged that Trump targeted the state because of Peters and because of Colorado’s mail-in balloting system and its laws limiting cooperation with immigration enforcement. The White House has denied that it punished Colorado last year because of Peters. Trump said in February the state was “suffering a big price” for not releasing her.

A job offer in California

Scrutiny over Peters’ commutation is unlikely to die away, particularly as she remains active in undercutting trust in the nation’s elections ahead of the November midterms. She has been offered a job as an assistant registrar of voters in California’s Shasta County, the clerk, Clint Curtis, .

Ticktin said Peters was considering the job and that it would be a temporary role to work with Shasta County “on their election concerns.” Curtis, a controversial election skeptic who was , did not respond to a message seeking comment. that he wanted Peters as a consultant “to assist us with making sure the FBI and (Department of Homeland Security) can test the ballots for authenticity.”

In the weeks since Polis’ May 15 clemency announcement, tens of millions of dollars in federal funding have been unlocked for the state. The Environmental Protection Agency uncorked $44 million on May 19. On May 22, the federal government released $40 million to purchase water rights — money that had been withheld for more than a year. On June 1, the state received $1.8 million for a small business development center; that funding had also been delayed for months.

“We can’t comment on the Trump administration’s reasoning for withholding and then releasing funding, which has been a common theme for Colorado and other states throughout his administration,” Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said in a June statement.

Ticktin declined to say whether he had been aware of the administration’s discussions to take action against Colorado, but he said they made sense, given that the state had gone “rogue.” He said that while “much” of the problems between Colorado and the federal government involved Peters, there were other issues, too.

“There were problems between the two governments,” he said. ” … It’s not just that they weren’t releasing Tina Peters.”

Trump has indeed had repeated run-ins with Colorado, from criticizing his presidential portrait in the state Capitol to the Colorado-born lawsuit that sought to keep him off of the 2024 ballot. Colorado’s Attorney General Phil Weiser has filed or joined dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, which has filed its own litigation challenging the state’s immigration laws and seeking access to state voter rolls.

But the Peters saga has drawn the most intense scrutiny and, for Polis, the most scathing criticism — first from Trump and now from Democratic Party members. After the governor announced her commutation, the Colorado Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted to censure him and strip him of certain privileges. He later fired two members of his commutation board after they revealed that the board had twice unanimously rejected Peters’ application — once at an initial meeting and then again after Polis’ office asked them to reconsider.

Peters in D.C. and ’60 Minutes’

As Polis has weathered a summer of criticism from his fellow Democrats, Peters has kept busy.

In June, she met with Trump in the Oval Office and has traveled to the nation’s capital at least three times. She later posted pictures to her website and social media showing her with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump campaign lawyer who’s now the Justice Department’s point person on civil rights.

Under the terms of her parole, Peters must receive permission to leave Colorado. Ticktin said that the state has treated her “the way they would treat any other prisoner that����ap been paroled” and that her requests have not been denied.

On her website, Peters wrote that she’d also met with the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency charged with protecting the nation’s election equipment. She spoke with and sat for an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes.” She described the interview during the same media appearance in which she talked about Warrington’s role in her release.

“They tried to blame Trump, everything on Trump — how he put pressure on Colorado, that the wildfires in Colorado right now are not getting the money that they deserve from the federal government because of me,” Peters said of “60 Minutes,” which has not yet aired the interview. “Everything was my fault and Trump’s fault.”

In June, she spoke at Rocky Mountain Voice’s Freedom Festival in Douglas County, where she alleged that she was “cheated” out of her 2022 bid to be secretary of state. (She lost in the ). She said she’d told Trump that she was discouraged that more had not been done about the nation’s election systems.

” ‘I’m seeing (Zohran) Mamdani get elected, I’m seeing (Abigail) Spanberger get elected, I’m seeing what’s going on in California, in Texas, and all over,’ ” she said she told the president, referring to New York’s democratic socialist mayor and the Democratic governor of Virginia. Both were elected last year.

“But they’re working,” she assured the audience of the Trump administration. “It may not be on our timeframe, but they’re working. Just know that.”

The New York Times contributed to this report.

But this simple email organizing a phone call to punish Coloradans is worse than Trump lining his own pockets with insider trading deals or doling out federal no-bid contracts to his children’s latest venture or granting a pardon to a big donor. If given the dystopian choice, we would rather a politician try to enrich himself and his cronies than intentionally harm innocent citizens.

The Dec. 15, 2025, email is further evidence that actions coming from a handful of federal agencies in the weeks that followed were part of a deliberate, organized and concerted effort to harm the great people of this state.

Trump’s illegal and harmful behavior cannot stand as a model for future presidents. Courts have consistently held that the federal government can use funding as a stick or a carrot to advance policy goals, but that political grievances or other arbitrary and capricious actions are illegal under the U.S. Constitution.

Trump administration officials may say their actions were done to advance legitimate public policy measures, but the record tells a different story. Trump lashed out publicly in late 2025 when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis refused to pardon Tina Peters, a supporter of Trump’s election fraud claims who used her political office to breach voting machines in Mesa County. Trump made public threats. Then, according to the record getting uncovered in the courts, he took action.

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper has called for each federal agency involved in the plan to harm Colorado to launch independent inspector general investigations. We also think the U.S. Government Accountability Office should launch an investigation given that many of the actions involved congressionally appropriated funds that were diverted for political reasons. Colorado’s entire congressional delegation can work together to get a committee to instigate a GAO investigation.

But perhaps most important are Colorado voters who this November can send a clear message — any candidate who does not denounce this illegal behavior from President Donald Trump’s administration is undeserving of our vote. Candidates for public office must choose: They can stand with Trump’s attack on this state, or they can stand with their constituents.

Fortunately, in these times of extraordinary corruption, the courts have proven to be a bulwark. The smoking-gun email was uncovered as part of discovery in a lawsuit filed by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser challenging the decision to strip Colorado Springs of the U.S. Space Command. Weiser has been aggressive in using the courts to stop Trump’s illegal actions, and the discovery of a meeting orchestrated specifically to find ways to harm this state is further evidence of why standing up and pushing back matters. An attorney from Weiser’s office called the meeting “a smoking gun.”

The president of the United States conspired to make our lives worse in countless ways. Trump’s vindictive rampage canceled needed federal funding from a clean drinking water project in southeastern Colorado and rejected wildfire recovery projects to rebuild utility lines on the Western Slope.

Of all the actions that followed in the days after the “brainstorm call,” the most brazen was the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s action to strip food stamps from thousands of low-income families in Colorado. These families held no stakes in Trump’s grudge against this state, and yet their food budgets were put in jeopardy as punishment.

Had courts not intervened, Colorado county officials would have had 30 days to conduct in-person interviews with 100,000 food stamp recipients or federal funding for the program would have been canceled. The task was intentionally impossible, preposterous and, we now know, part of a punitive scheme coming directly from the White House.

More evidence will be forthcoming following the court’s ruling: “This is an extraordinary memo, and it’s very troubling to this court,” U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said in court last week, ordering federal agencies to respond to Weiser’s requests for documents.

We know that many Americans were outraged in 2020 when then-President Joe Biden ordered the federal government not to contract with employers who didn’t require the COVID vaccine. Nineteen states sued, and the courts ruled the order was unconstitutional. But imagine the uproar if Biden had ordered federal agencies to brainstorm ideas to punish those states who refused to comply. And if following that meeting, Texas had lost federal funding on par with what was stripped from Colorado, which in addition to everything we’ve already mentioned included $615 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and $109 million in grant funding from the Department of Transportation.

We use this hypothetical example intentionally, because whether you agreed with the vaccine mandate or not, at least Biden was making the order in an attempt to pursue public health. Trump’s motivations, on the other hand, were personal and his actions were arbitrary.

Coloradans are the ones who ended up paying for it all.

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Under the subject line “brainstorm call,” Emily Underwood asked officials from five agencies to join a call later that day “prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.”

“The purpose of this call is to prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” Underwood, a deputy assistant to the president, wrote to officials from the departments of energy, transportation, interior and agriculture, as well as the Office of Management and Budget.

The email was sent at 2:43 a.m. on Dec. 15, hours before Trump over the continued imprisonment of former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters.

The Underwood email was disclosed publicly during a hearing in Denver on Tuesday as part of a Colorado lawsuit alleging retaliation by the Trump administration that state officials argue was motivated by the president’s frustration with Peters’ incarceration and by the state’s mail-in balloting system.

According to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Denver Post, a senior state attorney said the email amounted to a “smoking gun”: In the days that followed Underwood’s note, several agencies included in the email announced adverse actions against Colorado, canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and moving to close a renowned climate lab in Boulder.

“It’s extraordinary,” David Moskowitz, Colorado’s deputy solicitor general, said during the Tuesday hearing in U.S. District Court. The state had requested the hearing — and produced the email — in an effort to force the Trump administration to turn over more records. “And it’s extraordinary because the scheme was run directly out of (the Executive Office of the President).”

The White House on Thursday denied that the Underwood email was related to Peters. A spokeswoman did not comment on the record for this story, other than to direct questions about grant funding to the budget management office.

Throughout the fall, tension had mounted between the state and Trump administration.

In November, Colorado prison officials had rejected a request to transfer Peters, a Trump ally who was serving a prison sentence for facilitating a plot to give a third party access to secure election equipment. , demanding Peters’ release. (In May, Polis reduced her sentence and released her early.)

The Justice Department’s pardon attorney told Trump ally Steve Bannon that federal officials were putting “the right kind of pressure” on the state to secure Peters’ transfer; Trump had also promised “harsh measures” if the former clerk remained incarcerated.

Four days before Underwood’s email, the president .

Within days of that “brainstorm call,” that the Department of Energy was cutting $615 million in funding intended for Colorado. The Department of Transportation said to the state. The Office of Management and Budget moved to shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Federal emergency officials on the Western Slope. The Department of Agriculture .

Before the month was out, Trump vetoed legislation that would have brought clean water to parts of the state.

Underwood’s email appeared to leave the federal judge overseeing the case aghast. According to the transcript, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said the administration’s apparent targeting of Colorado “makes no sense in our democracy,” and he ordered the Executive Office of the President to turn over more documents and records to the state.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never even imagined something like it,” Jackson said of the email, which he read aloud in court. “The very idea that the president of the United States or the Executive Office of the President would target a state because they don’t feel that the state and its administrators are in line with the current administration’s priorities is phenomenal.”

“That’s not the country I think we live in,” he said later in the hearing.

In a statement Thursday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser called the email “shocking” and said it proved that “the White House orchestrated an unconstitutional scheme to weaponize the federal government to attack and punish Colorado for its lawful decisions over elections and our criminal justice system.”

Polis spokeswoman Ally Sullivan said in a separate statement that the Trump administration “has taken a number of actions that have negatively impacted Coloradans and our communities. If those decisions were based on political retribution against Colorado, we hope the courts will provide relief to Colorado.”

Sullivan did not respond to specific questions about the timing or substance of Polis’ call with Trump last year.

Officials in Colorado and elsewhere have long argued that the Trump administration has used the regulatory and financial powers of the federal government to target states that have run afoul of the president and his priorities. The lawsuit that produced the email was initially filed over allegations that Trump had moved U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs because of the state’s mail-in balloting system. Last month, that they’d terminated clean energy grants for several states, including Colorado, “based solely on the political identity” of those states.

During Tuesday’s hearing, lawyers for the state said they wanted the president’s office to turn over evidence, including records of oral or written communication, that may further prove that Colorado was targeted for unconstitutional retaliation. Moskowitz, the deputy solicitor general, said that the state has already received evidence that showed there was a “mad scramble” after the Dec. 15 meeting to “immediately identify actions against Colorado.”

He said the USDA had acknowledged that it had proposed its SNAP review after the call. The Energy Department, he said, held a “high-level mandatory (meeting) … to discuss what they were going to do.” That same day, the Interior Department “immediately requested … a compilation of all outstanding grants to Colorado or any entity simply located in Colorado.”

The hearing was about evidence discovery, and Adam Fox, the Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, largely did not respond to statements about the email, though he did not dispute its reported contents.

He argued that the state’s requests for more information from the president’s executive office were overly broad and burdensome, and that the state hadn’t first exhausted other avenues to get evidence that may help its case.

Jackson was largely unmoved. He asked Fox whether there “were so many written communications about actions or threats against Colorado that it’s an undue burden to even try to find them all.”

He ordered the federal government to comply with most of the state’s requests for additional evidence. He said he understood that the government should be protected from turning over information, particularly if it’s sensitive, to anyone who files a lawsuit against the president.

“But these are extraordinary times we’re talking about, and this is an extraordinary memo,” Jackson continued. “And it’s very troublesome to this court. And I think it would be very troublesome to most people if this were broadcast in The Denver Post, for example. This is something that I have never even conceived of before.”

The New York Times contributed to this report.

The district, covering Colorado Springs and its suburbs, is typically solid red. But national Democrats have marked the race to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank as demographic shifts, falling approval for President Donald Trump and fired-up liberal voters shifted the district’s rating from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican,” according to the

Crank is unopposed in the Republican primary.

Candidate Jessica Killin, a former U.S. Army captain and chief of staff to former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is going up against Joe Reagan, a U.S. Army combat veteran who turned to the nonprofit sector after his military career, in this month’s Democratic primary.

Reagan narrowly lost the 2024 primary for the Democratic nomination and is running again.

While the 5th District is expected to be a tighter race — the notes it is one of the few House districts that has consistently moved to the left over the past three presidential cycles — it will still take work to flip a district Crank won by 14 percentage points in 2024.

Killin, 52, is banking on doing so with a “Team Normal” platform.

“People are fed up and frustrated,” she said. “They want someone who is going to stand up for their community and stop playing partisan games. Yes, I have a ‘D’ behind my name, but I hate the labels. I am Team Normal… I am exhausted by the chaos, uncertainty, partisan bickering, tribalism.”

Killin had raised for her campaign as of the end of March — outraising incumbent Crank, who had raised more than $1.3 million.

“Jeff Crank has completely failed this community,” Killin said. “He is completely out of touch…The minute he took the oath, he went full MAGA (Make America Great Again). He lost Space Command. He’s never worked to stand up to Trump for our community. He hasn’t done anything to improve cost of living — he’s made it worse… I want our government to be functional again.”

Reagan raised during the same timeframe.

He served as a senior director at two nonprofit organizations, Easterseals, which helps people with disabilities, and veterans-focused Wreaths Across America. He works at a local nonprofit, Veterans Business Outreach Centers, which helps veterans open and operate small businesses.

The 44-year-old said veteran mental health and expanded healthcare access for everyone were priorities of his, along with working toward more affordable housing, making sure every child has access to a high-quality public education and supporting labor unions.

“When you are around town and talk to people about me, most don’t think of me as the Democratic candidate for Congress,” Reagan said. “They think of me as, ‘This is the guy at the Little League field with his kids every week, the guy who helped me start my small business, the incoming president of the Rotary Club.’ That����ap how you inspire trust.”

Reagan said his down-to-earth approach attracts people from all political factions. His campaign headquarters is a melting pot of progressive and moderate Democrats, “recovering Republicans” and independent voters, he said.

“So often, we get voters who say they don’t like either candidate and they’re going to vote for the lesser of two evils,” he said. “And in El Paso County, that means a Republican. It����ap on us to put forward a candidate people want to vote for.”

Reagan said there are El Paso County voters who support Democratic issues like the county during the 2024 election, but they still vote for conservative candidates.

“It����ap because they distrust the Democratic Party, and you break that by being a community organizer and leader first,” Reagan said. “I’m a combat veteran, so with 100,000 veterans in El Paso County, that puts me in a place I can relate directly to so many of our friends and neighbors.”

Killin, who secured early endorsements from all of Colorado’s congressional Democrats, zeroed in on cost-of-living issues as a core tenet of her campaign.

She said she would focus on improving the affordable housing stock in the Pikes Peak region and creating policies to get first-time homebuyers into homes. She would tackle the childcare desert to address skyrocketing childcare costs, she said.

“I joke that this is not your mother’s Colorado Springs,” Killin said. “People are hungry for change and normalcy. People are feeling so exhausted by this administration and Jeff Crank’s total failure, and that����ap how we win this.”

The military recently chose the base in Aurora as the potential host of a nuclear microreactor to produce always-on electric power for the facility, home to Space Base Delta 2 and the Mission Delta 4 missile-warning system.

The proposed compact nuclear fission reactor at Buckley, which would produce less than 10 megawatts of electric power and would not be connected to the larger electric grid, could be up and running by 2030, the Department of the Air Force says.

“There is a growing need for energy independence and access to uninterruptible power supplies for national security,” the department, which oversees the U.S. Space Force, said in a statement to The Denver Post this week in response to emailed questions. “Microreactors provide steady, reliable, and high-density energy that is less susceptible to grid failures and system outages caused by disruptions like natural disasters or cyber-attacks compared to other energy sources.”

Buckley was one of  to be part of the military’s Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program. The other two are Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and in Texas.

It’s not the first time the use of a small nuclear reactor has been pitched in Colorado. Last summer, Denver International Airport generated headlines when it said it would explore the possibility of locating such a reactor on airport land to help meet growing demand for electricity while reducing the use of carbon-emitting power.

Less than a week after that announcement, DIA put plans to commission a feasibility study on hold after Denver City Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore questioned why the airport didn’t first consult the community and residents around DIA.

The Buckley proposal has drawn increasing attention in the weeks since it was quietly announced.

City spokesman Joe Rubino said Aurora city leaders were aware of the military’s plans at Buckley but said any questions would need to be directed to the Department of the Air Force. Aurora City Councilwoman Amy Wiles, whose ward encompasses Buckley, said she has heard some concern from constituents about having a nuclear power source so close to neighborhoods.

Some have questioned whether waste from the reactor could pose a hazard, she said.

“Because it is in a ward surrounded by homes, I would like to know what the safety and notification plan is if something were to happen,” Wiles said.

The Air Force department said it would engage with local leaders and the public once its plans were firmed up, including holding public town halls featuring experts from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy.

One critic of the plan is Chris Allred, the nuclear guardianship coordinator with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. He said the reactor proposal at Buckley “is a key example of how nuclear energy is connected to militarism.”

“We are experiencing a nationwide propaganda campaign trying to sell nuclear energy to the public as clean energy that will help to mitigate the climate crisis,” he said.

But, Allred said, nuclear energy requires “massive quantities of water” — problematic for a state hobbled by a historic drought — and leaves behind an intractable waste problem.

“We should be allocating water toward organic agriculture and regenerative projects that help us to live in harmony with the environment, not investing further in nuclear technology and militarism,” he said. “We advocate for nuclear abolition because there is no long-term plan for management of radioactive waste.”

But Thomas Albrecht, the director of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Center at the Colorado School of Mines, said microreactors use nowhere near the amount of water that traditional and much bigger nuclear power plants require.

Most modular reactors, he said, can fit on the back of a semitruck.

“The water supply issue is a nonissue,” he said.

While there are no modular reactors up and running yet in the United States, Albrecht said some of those in the design phase will use molten salt, helium or liquid metal to help cool the fission process, obviating the need for large amounts of water.

And because microreactors are portable, Albrecht said, the entire unit can be removed and the waste processed or recycled by the private-sector contractor that provides the technology to the base. In Buckley’s case, the Department of the Air Force chose last month as its partner company on the initiative.

Modular nuclear reactors have more “up time” than wind or solar energy sources, Albrecht said, and they wouldn’t be subject to the emergency power shutoffs that Xcel Energy and other utilities have imposed to prevent wildfires during high-wind events.

“A military base can’t tolerate that,” he said. “It needs really stable, really reliable power.”

Still, the professor said, the military will need to bury and heavily fortify the microreactor to guard against terrorist attacks and ensure it can survive natural disasters. To that end, Aurora last year signed an agreement with the military and the FBI to prevent drone operators from flying unmanned aircraft systems over the base.

“They dig a hole or have a bunker in place, and they go underground,” Albrecht said. “The reactor has to be protected so that even in the event of something catastrophic, they are not accessible.”

The Department of the Air Force responded The Post’s questions through an unidentified spokesperson. The representative said any microreactor the military deploys “must follow strict federal nuclear safety regulations and environmental review processes.”

It would need an operating license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or authorization from the Department of Energy before it could go online.

“This includes development and expert review of detailed safety and emergency response plans — from reactor design to decommissioning,” the department said.

, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is seeking an estimated $2.7 billion appropriated to 13 states through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act during the Biden administration.

“This executive branch seems to think they have the power of the purse. They get to decide what’s funded. That’s not how our Constitution works,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who announced the lawsuit with California Attorney General Rob Bonta during a Wednesday news conference.

That’s why Colorado is suing the Trump administration for the 54th time, Weiser said.

“We’ve done it before, 57 other times,” Bonta said of his state’s lawsuits. “And today’s proof that we’ll do it again until Trump gets the message that California will not back down.”

The lawsuit said the federal funding terminated by the Department of Energy and the Office of Management and Budget is part of several billion dollars approved by Congress for “a broad array of funding for energy, technology and infrastructure development.”

In Colorado, Weiser said the approximately $600 million withheld includes nearly $300 million for Colorado State University to cut methane emissions from low-producing oil and gas wells.

More than $32 million was awarded to the Colorado School of Mines for the development of a carbon-storage hub in Pueblo. Another $8 million was approved for the development of new solar technology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Colorado is committed to a clean energy future, protecting our land, air and water, and the types of grants that are literally being undermined by this action is what we need to do,” Weiser said.

The administration is targeting Democratic-led states with its cut-off of money for programs, he added. Withholding grants from Democratic states while allowing grants to go to Republican states “is a classic arbitrary and capricious action that cannot stand.”

Bonta, Weiser and Washington Attorney General Nicholas Brown are leading the lawsuit. The other plaintiffs are Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.

Lawsuits against the administration signed onto by Weiser, a Democratic candidate for governor, include a challenge of President Donald Trump’s decision to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama; moves to cancel more than $25 million in public health grants; not releasing billions of dollars to build charging stations for electric vehicles; and a hold-up in money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois issued a temporary restraining order Feb. 12 to keep the public health funds flowing, saying the states stood a good chance of proving the federal government violated the law.

Asked by reporters about the resources spent to fight the Trump administration in court, Weiser and Bonta said it has paid off for the states in terms of the return on dollars. Weiser said his office received an additional $600,000 in state funding, which is being used to work on federal litigation.

“We have protected over $1 billion in funding,” Weiser said.

Repeat, outbound, not inbound.

The UniGroup Cos., parent of United Van Lines and Mayflower, has measured the ratio of inbound moves to outbound moves for states since 1977. And for the vast majority of those years, Colorado has had a higher share of moves in than moves out. From 2013-17, not counting 2016, it was a “high inbound” state, with 55% or more of its moves inbound.

“2025 is the first year that Colorado has been listed as a high outbound state since 1990,” said Eily Cummings, vice president of corporate communications at United Van Lines.

In 1990, the state was dealing with the aftermath of an oil and real estate boom that got out of hand and resulted in massive job losses. Today, the jobs remain, but housing costs have greatly outstripped incomes, chewing away at affordability for new and old residents alike, in both urban and rural areas.

Colorado is now running with a different crowd demographically. New Jersey leads the country with nearly 70% of its moves outbound. New York, with its larger and older population and high living expenses, had the second-highest outbound ratio at 57.8%. Retirees are a big part of the outbound moves in both states.

California matched New York’s outbound rate. Historically, it has been a more balanced state, but it has shifted to the high outbound camp as workers follow corporate relocations. Tesla, SpaceX, McKesson, Chevron, Charles Schwab, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Toyota North America are among the bigger names that have relocated from California to Texas.

A little bit ahead of Colorado was North Dakota, which has both one of the smallest populations in the country and one of the most extreme climates. It is hard to blame people for leaving a state where the record temperatures have ranged from a high of 121 degrees to a low of 60 degrees below zero, both in the same year, and where the economy is prone to boom and bust cycles.

“This report provides some interesting information, and the data may suggest there are challenges in some areas. I think outmigration is a big issue that has economic development implications. Those issues will likely be part of the 2026 elections,” said Broomfield economist Gary Horvath after reviewing the report.

Compared to 2019, Horvath notes that a higher share of people aged 55-plus and households with incomes above $150,000 are moving out. As for the state’s job opportunities and lifestyle, they have lost some of their drawing power. Whether that is temporary or a trend will determine the state’s future.

So, where are the former Colorado residents headed to? Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia and nearby states like Kansas are where most of the moving trucks leaving Colorado stop to unload, Cummings said.

Looking at moves nationally, Oregon is the top state for its ratio of inbound moves at 64.5%. Jobs, especially in tech and health care, are drawing workers. But secondary cities like Eugene, not Portland, are the ones that are benefiting.

West Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, Minnesota and Idaho, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama and Nevada are the other “popular” states in terms of inbound moves, at least by United Van Lines counts. For Colorado, Alabama’s presence is noteworthy, given that the Trump administration plans to shift U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville.

One of the arguments for keeping the headquarters in place is that people want to live here, not in Alabama. But the United Van Line numbers are telling a different story.

Family has become the top reason for moving nationally, nudging out jobs, which were the main motivator before the pandemic, Cummings said. About 3 in 10 of Colorado movers, in either direction, cite family as the primary reason for relocating.

The largest age groups moving in both directions are 65-plus, followed by 55- to 64-year-olds. Combined, they accounted for six in 10 outbound moves and about 54% of inbound moves.

It is important to note the survey’s limitations. Although United Van Lines examined more than 100,000 moves, its customers tend to be established homeowners with families who can afford a full-service mover. A recent college graduate or young professional would be more inclined to rent a U-Haul trailer or borrow grandpa’s pickup truck and move themselves.

Colorado’s migration picture looks more balanced in a released Tuesday. The state moved into the 23rd spot for inbound moves by do-it-yourself movers last year after ranking 40th in 2024. Last decade and during the pandemic, the state was a regular visitor on the top 10 list for inbound moves.

Outbound moves surpassed inbound moves in 2024, but last year Metro Denver .

Texas, Florida and North Carolina were the three most popular inbound states, per the U-Haul study, while California, Illinois and New Jersey were the three states with the highest share of outbound moves.

Former state demographer Elizabeth Garner, in explaining the state’s shrinking domestic migration counts, said that Colorado continues to attract young adults on the move, but is seeing an increase in older households moving out.

A majority of movers captured in the United Van Lines had household incomes above $150,000 — about six in 10 of those moving in and 55% of those moving out. Some of those moves might reflect highly-paid remote workers who relocated during the pandemic being called back to the home office. But it could also be a signal that even $150,000 a year isn’t enough to afford Colorado.

About 5% of those leaving Colorado cited living costs as the primary reason for the move. That may not seem like a lot, but it is one of the highest shares cited in any state, given that people don’t like to admit they can’t afford the place they once called home.

“A lot of people don’t choose cost of living. That is telling. The only states that are higher on that are California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Montana,” Cummings said.

Within Colorado, Fort Collins is the only “strong inbound” metro area left. Boulder and Grand Junction are balanced. Denver and Colorado Springs are at 57% outbound, higher than the state average, while Greeley matches the state average at 55%.

And then there is Pueblo, where three people moved out for every person moving in. Its 75% outbound ratio was third third-highest in the country of any city. If there is a bright side to that dire number, it is that things have improved from 2024, when 81% of the moves were outbound.

About the only thing supporting population growth in Colorado the past couple of years has been international migration, but that is slowing sharply. If the United Van Line numbers are right, the state can’t expect domestic migration, already weak, to fill in the gap.

Cummings notes that there is a discernible shift nationally of younger adults leaving large metro areas for smaller- to medium-sized metro areas that are more affordable. If families, not jobs, remain the biggest driver of moves, and if the state’s young adults have to move elsewhere to afford a home, then outbound flows could continue.

Colorado’s population is younger than that of other outbound states, but aging, and the lure of being closer to grandchildren or living in a milder climate, could fuel more departures in the years ahead.

And in that regard, Colorado risks heading down the path of New Jersey, which has been a high outbound state for the past 15 years. Like Colorado, it is considered a “launch” state able to attract young professionals. But it has become a state where its oldest residents are symbolically raising the unofficial New Jersey state bird in the rear view mirror as they head out on the turnpike.

Led by the  the new organization wants to strengthen the state’s position as a national leader in the industry. The foundation is the nonprofit, educational arm of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce.

The Aerospace & Defense Alliance is an initiative of the chamber’s “Vision 2033: Blueprint for Colorado’s Future.” The plan grew out of talking to chambers of commerce around the state over two years and an analysis by economists of Colorado’s economy and business climate.

The blueprint looks at challenges and areas where Colorado is competitive, said Rachel Beck, executive director of the chamber foundation. “We have some tailwinds and one of those was aerospace.”

Colorado’s aerospace industry is the country’s second-largest, behind only California. The state has the most aerospace employees per capita in the nation. Approximately 2,000 aerospace businesses employ 55,000 people directly and another 184,000 directly, according to the

Nearly $23 billion in federal contracts went to Colorado aerospace and defense companies from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.

Beck said the aim of the new space alliance is to ensure that Colorado’s aerospace and defense industries continue to be strong and grow. The group, which includes industry representatives, wants to make sure Colorado’s interests are known in Washington, D.C.

“We want to make sure that those companies stay here, they come here, they grow here and they don’t go to other states instead,” she said.

U.S. Space Command is one that’s getting away. President Donald Trump announced in September that he will move the command to Huntsville, Ala., the spot he chose during his first term as president. Joe Biden had reversed Trump’s decision and declared Colorado Springs as the command’s permanent home.

Losing Space Command “was a bit of a red flag,” Beck said.

The Air Force cited cost and other factors in 2021 when it identified Army Redstone Arsenal in Alabama as the preferred location for the new U.S. Space Command.

But Trump also raised politics when he said one of the factors in his decision was that voters in Colorado mostly vote by mail. He has said he wants to calling them “corrupt.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is suing over the Trump administration’s decision.

“We think the data showed that Colorado was the best place for Space Command,” Beck said. “I think that the business community and the state did a great job of pulling together to advocate for that. It’s clear to me that the industry does have a lot of advocates and a lot of allies who understand how important the industry is here.”

Beck said the Colorado Chamber Foundation doesn’t intend to duplicate the work being done by other advocates, including the and the. She said folks in the industry expressed the need to communicate more with people at the federal level about “what����ap happening in Colorado and what we bring to the table.”

The alliance will be headed by Christie Lee, director of state and local affairs at United Launch Alliance, and Chad Vorthmann, government relations representative at Lockheed Martin Space.

One of the first plans is to work with economists on a comprehensive analysis of Colorado’s aerospace and defense industries.