A Montana Take on Why We Can’t Build Anything Anymore

There's a town called Babb, Montana. It's on the edge of Glacier National Park. How could Cyrus Babb and his crew basically have built that water project in the 1800's by hand, and now we as a country can't seem to be able to build anything anymore?

If you missed Sean Hannity's great interview with President Trump and Elon Musk, they talked about the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted by our federal government that's now being identified by DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.

After watching that interview, and their chat about why it is taking so long to build a new Air Force One platform, I thought back to our conversation with Marko Manoukian out of Malta earlier this week. How is that Elon Musk and DOGE have already identified hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending from our federal government, and that same government couldn't spend $200 million to fix "the lifeline of the Hi Line?"

Manoukian is, as President Trump would say, a very high IQ individual. He's a former MSU Extension agent, rancher, and Co-Chair of the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group. They've been trying to get the feds to finally fix the St. Mary irrigation project for years. That system just suffered a catastrophic failure last summer.

The St. Mary irrigation project is considered to be the lifeline of the Hi Line. It provides irrigation water and clean drinking water all along the northern tier of Montana.

Think about it. DOGE recently identified the $68 million that the Biden Administration was trying to spend to house illegal aliens in fancy NYC hotels. That alone would have covered a massive portion of this important project.

Back to the bigger question- why is it so hard to build anything anymore. Congressman Ryan Zinke (R-MT01), Trump's former Interior Secretary, had some great remarks before the Montana Legislature earlier this week.

Rep. Zinke: Let's say you have a salmon and a trout in the same stream. Let's say upstream you have a national forest, and downstream you have a dam. I've just described every watershed in the great state of Montana, most of the watersheds in our western United States. So this is how we manage it. The trout are actually managed by Department of Interior through US Fish and Wildlife Service. The salmon are managed by the Department of Commerce through US Fish and Wildlife NOAA. The Forest Service- surface is the Department of Agriculture through US Forest Service. Subsurface is the Department of Interior through Bureau of Land Management. Our dam system. It's either Department of Army through Army Corps of Engineers like Libby, or it's Department of Interior through a Bureau of Reclamation, like Hungry Horse Dam. And I haven't even talked about it an Indian compact. So let's say you want to build a bridge, you want to build or restore a pipeline, or upgrade a pipeline, you have to literally go through multiple departments with different leadership, oftentimes conflicting regulation in 168 different regions, and you wonder why we can't get things done. And so what's happening in DC is a shake up, and I agree with it."

Click here for a link to the full video.