Donald Trump resumed the presidency last Monday and those in the trucking industry are keen observers when it comes to what he plans to do for them, or to them.
A national trucking analyst, who is a former college classmate of Trump’s, said the president’s brash style could lead to unpredictable results. Most believe the president will ease regulations, especially environmental requirements pushed by the Environmental Protection Agency during President Joe Biden’s administration, and renew the corporate tax cuts first passed in 2017.
Noël Perry, who runs the consulting firm Transport Futures of Cornwall, Pennsylvania, said Trump’s pro-business approach isn’t without risk.
“We are in an extraordinarily risky environment,” Perry said during an appearance at the Freightwaves’ F3: Future of Freight Festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in November. “Whatever you say about the politics of Donald Trump, his management style is highly volatile and therefore risky. It may give better outcomes; it may give worse, but it’s highly risky. The supply situation and pricing situation in trucking is a mess right now, and the geopolitical situation is the worst that I’ve experienced since back in the Vietnam [War] days.
“The demand side economy … is stale. We’ve been overbuying for a long time. So my message to my customers is that you need to be prudent for the next couple of years, because all the risks are on the downside.”
Perry, who attended the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s with Trump, said the president is almost certain to have an easing regulatory effect on the industry. The EPA issued a rule requiring 30% of tractors to be zero-emission by 2032, something company executives adamantly oppose as unrealistic.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has also proposed a rule to restrict the speed of tractors nationwide that was scheduled to start in May.
“It is really good to have a president who is light on regulation rather than heavy on regulation,” Perry said. “The upcoming change in emission regulations is likely to go much more easily because of the Trump administration, that’s one. “The big one is we were looking at a change in speed limits in 2026, which would have been the biggest regulatory shock in the history of the industry, not to include deregulation. That is almost certainly dead.
“With respect to operations, and that’s the part that I’m starting with here, the Trump administration is definitely a plus for the trucking industry.”
Closer to home, Arkansas Trucking Association President Shannon Newton is looking forward to what Trump can do for the industry. “Overwhelmingly, the industry supports this administration and believes that the changes it brings with it are good for the trucking industry,” Newton said.
“Certainly, a new administration provides an opportunity to revisit and potentially reshape some policies. The industry enthusiastically welcomes that on issues like the environment and labor. But uncertainty remains of exactly which policies, what changes and how quickly they can be made.”
Perry said Trump will almost certainly call for an extension of the 2017 Tax Cut & Jobs Act. Perry said the tax cut will give the economy a short-term jolt and the transportation industry will see an uptick in business because of that.
The potential risk, though, is that the stimulus may increase capacity in an industry that is best served by restricting capacity. Excess capacity was a major driver in a rash of companies going out of business in 2019, and many of those companies rushed into the market during the post-tax cut boom times.
“[A]ll that does is mean that we don’t need as much capacity in the market, and therefore you’re creating an environment where we already have an oversupplied environment,” Zach Strickland said at the Freightwaves event. Strickland is director of freight market intelligence at Freightwaves. “So that’s only going to feed into a bit of an oversupply, because regulations in general — not all of them — they’re barriers to entry.”
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