Freight tonnage slump deepens with President Trump’s tariff policy

This story first appeared in The Long Haul 2025, an annual special section that celebrates National Truck Driver Appreciation Week by looking at Eastern Iowa’s trucking industry.

Tariffs have been the talk of Washington, D.C., since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. In Eastern Iowa, trucking companies continue to navigate a prolonged downturn.

Truck freight tonnage has been sluggish throughout the year, continuing a trend that was marked prior to the 2024 election, according to the American Trucking Associations’ July tonnage report. However, a dip in freight occurred in the beginning of the year, coinciding with Trump’s inauguration.

“If I look back over the past several months, what we saw was a bit of an increase toward the end of the year, and then as soon as the year began, we saw a decrease in freight tonnage we haven’t seen since the summer of 2022,” said Jonathan Phares, assistant professor of supply chain management at Iowa State University.

According to Phares, the trend indicates that companies bought inventory in preparation for the broad tariffs the then-president-elect planned to enact.

Tariffs were a prominent part of Trump’s campaign as he sought to reset global trade based on his criticism that trade partners had taken advantage of the United States. The president has threatened, imposed, paused and made exceptions on 10 percent baseline tariffs on imports from across the globe.

The on-again, off-again nature of Trump’s approach to tariffs has set in place an air of uncertainty among industries that rely on foreign trade. For the trucking industry, it is reflected in freight tonnage figures.

“We’ve had some depressed levels of freight tonnage since he took office,” Phares said. “That leads me to believe that even though a lot of the tariffs hadn’t gone into place, all the pre-buying happened, and then there’s just kind of a delay on additional buying. Typically, we see a lot of fluctuation month-to-month.”

Scott Larson, vice president of JMS Transportation in Cedar Rapids, said he is optimistic that freight will pick up in the fall — but the summer months were a lull.

“We’ve been in a freight recession even before the tariffs hit, but I think it has played a role,” he said. “We see an uptick right now because school is back, but during the summer, (it was) pretty low. We felt the slump more this year than in the past few years.”

The slowdown has caused JMS Transportation to send its drivers out further than it normally would. Larson said his fleet of 125 trucks typically operates within about 350 miles of Cedar Rapids. Those routes have extended to between 500 and 700 miles, taking drivers to Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.

“The farther out you go, the rates per mile are cheaper, so we’ve had to adjust to that a little bit,” Larson said. “We’re trying to maintain. Everybody used to be on a three- to five-year cycle for contracts. Now it’s six months to one year, and they’re negotiating just because they know what the economy is doing right now.”

  Buy Photo

JMS Transportation has also instituted a hiring freeze for the first time in 10 years.

The fall season is when Larson’s company often begins looking to upgrade equipment. It will not be doing so this year as it continues to weather the uncertainty created by tariffs and shifting trade policy.

“We’re just going to maintain what we have and not increase our debt at all,” Larson said. “We’re going to end up running it out probably another 100,000 miles, which will cost us more in the long run. If you need it, you buy it. If you don’t, you wait.”

While the tariff policy has broad effects on trucking, those effects are felt unevenly. How deeply they are felt depends in part on the types of freight a company may specialize in or its area of operation, Phares said.

“If we’re looking at private transportation, private fleets, they might not be impacted so much because they tend to carry the core volume or the average volume transported by the owners of those private fleets,” he said. “So they would see a consistent demand over time.”

Tim Jensen, chief executive officer of Jensen Transport based in Independence, said Trump’s tariff policy has caused minimal changes to his company's operations.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, subsequent supply-chain disruption and inflation can still be felt in the industry, according to Jensen.

“It’s been 28 consecutive months of a trucking down to even before the election, where freight overall has remained declining or at a lower level,” Jensen said. “For us, tariffs haven’t brought major changes to trucking. The day-to-day picture looks much the same.”

To some degree, Jensen said Trump’s tariff policy has been successful in shifting U.S. companies toward buying and producing domestically.

  Buy Photo

“Some goods that used to come from Canada are now being made in the U.S. at a lower cost, opening the door for more local manufacturing,” Jensen said.

The United States is imposing 10 percent tariffs on Canada for energy and energy resources, and 35 percent tariffs on a broad array of goods and products with exemptions for steel and aluminum. A 40 percent tariff aimed at pushing Canada to curb the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States is set to take effect Sept. 1.

Jensen Transport has added some new customers in the past year, Jensen said. The type of freight its fleets are hauling has not changed much, with the focus remaining on products based in Iowa.

“It’s important to always be looking at ways that you can improve,” Jensen said. “I can’t control the economy, but I can make sure that we’re working with companies that provide a value greater than the cost. Flexibility is key.”

Jensen Transport has taken steps to become more flexible in the face of outside variables. In 2022, Jensen Manufacturing Solutions was incorporated, building parts for Iowa businesses in Independence.

The idea of Jensen Manufacturing Solutions began as a sketch on a napkin in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jensen said.

“We have changed and grown due to COVID and the tariffs,” Jensen said. “We expect our transportation side to grow due to our willingness to help supply companies with domestically sourced materials.”