The work that built America is waiting to be done again

America says it values hard work. This week, Congress has a chance to prove it.

Lawmakers are debating the SPEED Act — a bipartisan permitting reform bill that could help reignite the American Dream for millions of working families. By setting firm timelines on federal permitting for energy, mining, logging, and infrastructure projects, the bill would determine whether responsible projects get built — or remain buried in paperwork for decades.

That question isn’t abstract to me. I grew up in Libby, Montana, a timber town where work wasn’t just a paycheck — it was identity.

Our high school mascot was the Logger. When the football team scored, chainsaws roared from the bleachers. That sound wasn’t noise. It was respect. It was the valley saluting the millwrights, welders and loggers who built the American West with sweat and skill.

For generations, a kid in Libby could graduate high school on Friday, lace up his boots on Monday, and earn a living that supported a home, a truck and a family. No résumé. No pedigree. Just work ethic, gloves and an older tradesman willing to teach him the craft.

That world didn’t disappear because Americans stopped wanting to work. It disappeared because the system stopped letting them.

Just outside Libby sits the Montanore Project — one of the largest undeveloped copper and silver deposits in the country. First proposed in the 1980s, it has spent more than forty years navigating environmental reviews, lawsuits, and bureaucratic delays. Entire generations have grown up, started families, and moved away while a project capable of supporting hundreds of good-paying jobs sat frozen on paper.

Not because the resource wasn’t there. Not because the workforce wasn’t capable. But because the permitting process never ends.

This story isn’t unique. Over the past two decades, millions of acres of timber in Montana alone have burned. Enough lumber to build millions of homes — reduced to smoke and ash. Projects that could have thinned forests, reduced fire risk, and kept mills running were delayed or killed outright.

The cost isn’t just environmental. It’s economic and cultural. It’s lost paychecks, shuttered mills, apprenticeships that never formed, and families who watched opportunity slip away while regulators asked for just one more study.

This is where my friend Mike Rowe enters — and why I asked him to contribute to this column. “If we can’t make a more persuasive case for the skilled trades,” he told me, “and for the dignity of the work itself, America’s skills gap will continue to widen. Long before these failures were headline news, Rowe was sounding the alarm about the collapse of America’s skilled trades — on Dirty Jobs, in sworn testimony before Congress, and in conversations with thousands of employers across the country.

“Something fundamental has broken, and today, not a week goes by that I don’t hear from the leader of some essential industry, desperate for skilled workers. ‘Where are they?’ they ask. I always tell them the same thing: they’re in the eighth grade.”

Rowe didn’t just diagnose the problem — he invested in solutions. Through the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, he has awarded nearly $20 million in work-ethic scholarships to Americans who chose trade school over a four-year degree. He has also launched advocacy campaigns in several states, including Texas, to highlight the millions of good-paying trade jobs sitting open today.

Those efforts are having an impact. But until we eliminate senseless regulations and onerous compliance burdens that prevent projects from ever breaking ground, Rowe — and anyone serious about closing the skills gap — will continue fighting uphill. Without enough real, breadwinner jobs, young Americans are pushed toward debt-financed degrees that too often fail to deliver stability, while the skilled trades that once built the middle class sit sidelined by a system that won’t let work begin.

You can’t rebuild the middle class if the jobs never get off the drawing board.

That’s why the SPEED Act matters — and why it matters now. The bill would establish clear, enforceable timelines for federal permitting, end endless reviews, and allow responsible projects to move forward while still protecting land and water. It doesn’t weaken environmental standards. It restores common sense.

America’s greatest renewable resource isn’t sunlight or wind. It’s the work ethic of people who know how to build, fix, mine, mill, weld, wire, and restore the physical world. They don’t need lectures about dignity. They live it.

The people who want to work are not the problem. The system that won’t let them is.

If Congress is serious about restoring opportunity and giving working families a fair shot at the American Dream, there is an obvious first step: pass the SPEED Act and let Americans do the work again.

Jesse Ramos is the State Director for Americans for Prosperity–Montana, a waste-to-energy CEO, and a former city councilman who grew up in a timber town that once powered the American West.

Mike Rowe is the founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation and longtime host of Dirty Jobs. He is a leading national voice in closing the skills gap and restoring respect for the trades.