Republicans in the U.S. congress ordered the already built follow on satellite destroyed to intentionally blind us in the Arctic and berated the U.S. military for building and storing the satellite.
No, actually. The story behind DMSP-20 is much more complicated and less conspiratorial than that, and the decision to cancel it had
basically nothing to do with the Arctic.
DMSP-20 was built in the mid-1990s, had been in (expensive) storage for two decades, and was both ageing and technologically obsolescent. The cost to launch it would be high, and many people were debating whether it was worth it. An Air Force study in the summer of 2014 recommended against launching DMSP-20, keeping it in storage was running $40 million per year, and every additional year made it more likely that something would go wrong if it were launched.
The DMSP constellation was not intended for monitoring Arctic sea ice, it was intended to provide support for weather forecasting by the US Air Force. The program was not planned to be perpetual and it had been assumed that "something else" would replace the F-series satellites after DMSP-20. First that "something else" was going to be a joint military/civilian mission (NPOESS), then the military part got moved to DWSS (Defense Weather Satellite System), then that got killed and replaced by something called WSF-M.
There are lots of angles to this story we could talk about. One of them is a longstanding argument within the US earth observation satellite industry about the relative merits of building large expensive multi-purpose systems vs smaller, lighter, cheaper platforms. Both approaches have been tried and both have had their problems (ICESat GLAS was an example of what happens when the faster, cheaper approach turns out not to also be "better").
Another and related angle is that since the end of the 1990s the Bush and then Obama administrations waffled back and forth repeatedly on how to move forward with ALL the US earth observation satellite programs. In the early 2000s the Bush administration was gripped with a mania for "privatization" of the nation's EO assets and wasted years going down a road (privatize some systems, reorganize others) that turned out to be a complete dead end. More than a decade ago Bush's science advisor admitted to me that he knew that yes, in retrospect they had basically screwed up and wasted critical time, given that the US government process for developing and building new satellites is insanely slow and sclerotic.
Yet another strand to this fiasco is a total lack of understanding by policymakers (in the White House and in Congress) of the differences among different types of EO systems and why those differences matter. Former students of mine now working at NASA are tearing their hair out trying to justify why they have to spend hundreds of millions to build and launch a handful of extremely complex systems when a private company (Planet Labs) can build (and pay someone to launch) 200 tiny cubesats for a fraction of the cost. There are actually reasonable answers to that question but it takes a lot of bringing people up to speed before they can understand the answers, and in order to shepherd a satellite through the decade-plus-long development process you keep needing to explain the issues over and over again to generation after generation of White House staff and Congressional fact-finders.
I could go on and on about this. Yes, the US government's (mis)management of its earth observation satellite programs has often been infuriating and fiascos abound. Yes, Congress keeps going back to the idea that we could save money by just buying data from someone else, and every time someone comes up with that idea it wreaks massive havoc on all the future plans.
But no, Congress did not kill DMSP-20 to "intentionally blind us in the Arctic". All of us here on ASIF are rather obsessed with the Arctic but that was absolutely not a factor in the decisionmaking process. 
