Tuesday handed Congress to the other party and started a clock. The administration has two years to leave something behind, with a House and Senate that owe it nothing. Laws get repealed. Rules get rewritten. But a yard with steel in the ground stays, and its payroll stays, whoever takes the oath in 2029. A president cannot pass a tax credit alone. He can deregulate to decide where the first shovel goes. Next year, every state legislature meets, most in January. The states that use those sessions well will be first in line.
The president’s April 2025 order directed the Commerce Department to plan Maritime Prosperity Zones, modeled on Opportunity Zones and spread across the map, the Great Lakes included. A House bill from Reps. Mike Kelly (R-PA) of Pennsylvania and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) of Texas would write up to 100 of them into the tax code. It is pending in the House Ways and Means Committee, no zone has been designated, and, in January, it must be refiled in a House run by Democrats. The bill is Republican. The idea is not. Eight Great Lakes senators, four from each party, wrote the president asking that the zones be defined by activity rather than geography, so their yards qualify. Kelly’s district includes Erie.
Opportunity Zones show why the map matters. Treasury counts $112 billion invested through 2024, reaching more than three-quarters of designated tracts. The capital went where the ground was ready.
Here is how a state gets to the front. It hands permitting inside any federal zone to Washington, before Washington has drawn one. That is a Mirror Zone. Every big project today answers to three governments at once, and each can say no. Inside a Mirror Zone, there is one: The federal agencies write the rules and run the reviews as if the ground were federal land. No state permit. No local permit. Mirror to invite the feds and show builders you are open for business. When the feds designate, you are ready to build.
The state gives up no standard. It gives up a wait. One review instead of three, every agency at the table at the same time, the same bar cleared once. The same handoff serves whatever Washington prioritizes next, whether yards, data centers, or housing. A legislature passes it once, and the governor says yes or no to each new zone.
Congress can help too. The bill hands the Commerce Department 100 picks and lets it wait until July 2027 to start. That was fine for the majority that wrote it. The new majority is not going to hand 100 ribbon cuttings to the other party’s commerce secretary. Take the picking out of it. Write an objective test into law, and any tract that meets it qualifies once its state opts in. By right doesn’t end the race — it moves it from lobbying for a slot to getting ready for the capital. Each year a tract waits is a year of raises its welders never get back. A raise delayed is a raise denied.
The workforce is the race inside the race. McKinsey says American shipbuilders need more than 200,000 more workers. The state whose community colleges and trade schools teach to the yard’s specifications grows the welders who earn better wages in the new yard.
Mirroring does not guarantee designation. Washington decides where the zones go. But the tax break needs Congress — the permit handoff does not. A permit line costs a builder more than most tax breaks ever save it. Put yourself in the Oval Office with two years on the clock and a pilot you can run on your own authority, as former President Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency did with Project XL. One state has handed you the permits. Another has sent a letter. You know where the shovel goes first.
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A zone’s benefits are hard to undo. A groundbreaking cannot be undone. Every month it moves up is a month of wages banked, profits booked, and taxes collected. 2028 will matter. But whoever wins, the welders hired in 2027 will still be welding.
That is the race. It starts in the statehouses in January, and the states that mirror first get a head start. Let America build again.
Stephen Hollingshead is the chairman of the Center for American Interests & Policy, whose Council to Modernize Governance runs the Mirror Zones project (mirrorzones.org), and he advises infrastructure builders on permitting at Candor. He was a deputy assistant secretary of housing and urban development under former President George W. Bush.