America's Mom-And-Pop Truckers In Dire Straits As Bad News Mounts 

Submitted by American Truckers United's Gord Magill, 

The American trucking industry continues to face a growing number of challenges in 2025, with economic turbulence downstream of President Trump's tariff reforms merely the latest bump on a very poorly maintained road. Many within the freight, logistics, and supply chain industries are predicting the ride to get even bumpier, with thousands of trucking companies at risk along the way. Will small-time trucking businesses survive?

An aspect of supply chain shocks experienced during Covid is known as the 'accordion effect', where a disruption in one part of the chain take time to be felt in another, but then the shock arrives at speed, good and hard. This tweet offers an explanation of Trump's tariffs and how that shock is expected to affect trucking.

"The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn't realize it yet. Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down. It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA. 45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train. 55 to New York by sea. That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th.

"Around that time (it's already started to happen) trucking work is going to dry up. Warehouses will start doing layoffs because no labor is needed to unload containers and some products will be out of stock, reducing the need for shipping labor."

The problem for America's truckers is that the situation is already dire, and has been for some time. News of small and medium-sized trucking companies going out of business has been a near-daily occurrence since 2023, and that is just what we know from being reported - how many single-truck independent owner-operators have gone out of business in the same time? Tracking those numbers is very difficult to almost impossible, over and above the cavalier attitude from the government towards the plight of these people.

How many more will go out of business given predictions that already below cost trucking rates are going to go even lower?

"In 2008, some of the largest truckload carriers offered to haul freight at $.80/mile to anywhere. They simply wanted to cover driver wages and fuel, but keep the trucks moving to avoid losing all of their drivers. If things get bad, it could happen again."

How did the trucking market find itself in this position?

The market for truck drivers has long been juiced by the government, as they have been deceived by mega carriers and their corporate lobbyists into believing that there is a shortage of truckers. This narrative has existed for decades now, and has resulted in one of the longest-running stealth corporate welfare programs in the nation, where the taxpayer shovels out millions upon millions of dollars at these carriers to finance the training of new drivers, without anyone ever asking why the industry can't keep them around. If the taxpayer wasn't on the hook for a system that burns through so many people that many trucking companies have 90% plus annual turnover rates, the market would have maintained its own equilibrium. 

Another way the government has flooded the market is through the use and misuse of insourced labor. Under the 2021 'Biden Harris Trucking Action Plan', an apparent scheme began to take place where 'red tape' cutting resulted in many states handing out CDLs to migrants and refugees, part of which was made possible by loopholes created during the Obama Administration that saw enforcement of English language proficiency requirements for CDL holders waived. Statistics compiled by American Truckers United...

... indicate that production of CDLs doubled from 2021 to 2022. Of course, this flooding of the market by Biden was going to result in fierce rate slashing and many trucking companies going out of business.

And also...

Yet in the face of this, companies largely made up of migrants continue to thrive.

What gives? Even the American Trucking Association, whom have been artificially inflating the number of truckers for decades, has had to admit there is a problem here. In a recent interview given to Overdrive Magazine, the ATA appears to be cynically attempting to get ahead of a problem they themselves have caused and benefitted from, citing problems discussed years earlier by the likes of American Truckers United.

"In a recent letter to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, ATA President Chris Spear, echoing what the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association recently told Congress, called for DOT to "begin better tracking the number of new CDLs issued on a state-by-state basis, including, but not limited to, the number of non-domiciled CDLs that are issued on an annual basis.""

Is DOT Secretary Duffy listening to anyone, though? His publicly available commentary about the trucking industry has been sparse to non-existent; he appears to be busy attempting to define what an astronaut is instead.

America's truck drivers are facing a crisis: A massive problem created by the Biden Administration now runs into the corrective economic measures taken by Trump's tariff program, which will include an uncomfortable period of trade rebalancing. As ZeroHedge describes in the note "All Quiet On The Western Ports... Is This The Calm Before The Trade War Storm?"

Secretary Duffy, along with new FMCSA head Derek Barrs, must immediately investigate what went on with Biden's 'Trucking Action Plan' and how it flooded the market with insourced labor of dubious skill and even more dubious legality, and take steps to remove that insourced labor from the roads by enforcing existing laws which are meant to keep the American motoring public safe, and the domestic trucking market functional. 

American Truckers United's Shannon Everett warned: "If we don't act swiftly, a tidal wave of American trucking companies will face bankruptcy, accelerating a devastating replacement cycle that could cripple the industry."