Truckload haulers are seeing green shoots of demand as they monitor a shifting tariff and regulatory landscape under the Trump administration, Truckload Carriers Association President Jim Ward told Trucking Dive in an interview this week.
Members expressed bullishness about the upcoming year during the group’s Truckload 2025 conference in Phoenix last week, Ward said.
“They're pretty optimistic about the future,” he said.
Trucking Dive pulled together some of Ward’s top takeaways from the event, which drew 1,300 carriers and vendors, to provide a sense of the truckload sector’s priorities and outlook for the rest of the year.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
TRUCKING DIVE: What are you hearing from members at events like Truckload 2025?
TCA PRESIDENT JIM WARD: Our members are very enthusiastic about some of the changes that they are seeing being made by some of the secretaries and administrators. People are really excited about Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. They're very pleased with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and some of the moves that he's making from an emissions standpoint, which we think are certainly putting a pause on emissions rules that were going to be very disruptive to this industry if they continued down in the path at the pace that was being required.
We're big supporters of being great stewards of the environment. But we keep saying it's got to be fiscally responsible. It's got to be achievable. You have to have the equipment and the technology to do what you need to do so you can continue to service your customers and provide a quality work environment for your professional driving employees.
Everybody was really optimistic about what they're seeing and how things are going now.
What’s the industry’s outlook on potential changes to the independent contractor model?
Protecting the integrity of the independent contractor model is still very much a concern of everybody.
It's yet to be determined what Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s position is going to be on some of these things. She keeps saying she's going to follow President Donald Trump's lead. If she does, everybody was pretty pleased with the labor policy around independent contractors and some of the changes that he made in his previous administration.
If they follow that same path, I think we're going to be in a good position. But that's yet to be determined.
How are truckload carriers adjusting to the whiplash on tariffs?
Nobody truly understands what the outcome is going to be and what next Wednesday, April 2, is going to look like — what's going to change, even between now and then. So there's a lot of unknowns, but for the most part, I would just say that everybody was starting to see some some green shoots.
If you listen to the fourth-quarter results of a lot of the public companies, they were starting to see a little bit of improvement in the business, which gave them some optimism.
Tariffs have put a little bit of a pause on everybody. They’re kind of sitting here thinking, “What are manufacturers going to do from a capital investment standpoint?” I don't think anybody knows what is going to happen in this tariff situation but one person, and he's holding all the cards and playing it day by day.
The comment that I heard: When it comes to tariffs, a lot of our members feel like rocks on the seashore right now with the waves pounding against them every single day, just kind of waiting to see how the dust settles.
