US truckload carriers — already operating against a freight backdrop the American Trucking Associations has described as persistently soft — face a fresh margin and volume hit from President Trump's tariff regime, according to experts cited by Reuters.

The Reuters headline, carried Tuesday, frames the concern in two words: "endanger" and "struggling." Both merit scrutiny before carriers price the risk into RFP responses.

What the reporting actually tells readers

The available Reuters headline asserts a directional threat: tariffs, applied to a freight cycle that has yet to recover to pre-2022 volumes, endanger an industry that was struggling before the new duties took effect. The full Reuters body has not been publicly indexed beyond the headline in the material reviewed here, so the carrier names, lane pairs, and dollar figures behind the warning are not yet on the record.

That gap matters. Trucking analysts routinely distinguish between spot-rate compression, contract-rate erosion, fuel surcharges, and accessorial fee dilution. A blanket "tariffs hurt trucking" claim needs unpacking before shippers, brokers, or 3PLs reforecast Q3 budgets.

Why the timing is structurally bad

Even setting the Reuters report aside, the underlying arithmetic is unforgiving. Dry van spot rates on the spot-heavy DAT lanes have spent the better part of two years below five-year averages, while contract renewals through 2024 closed at single-digit-percentage declines year over year for many large shippers. Tariff-driven disruption tends to push two variables that operators cannot hedge:

• Import-dependent retail freight volumes. West Coast dray and Los Angeles/Long Beach onward trucking volumes move in step with TEU throughput; the Port of Los Angeles processed roughly 9.3 million TEU in 2023 and a comparable volume in 2024, both below the 2021 peak.
• Cross-border manufactured goods flows. Laredo and El Paso truck crossings react within weeks, not quarters, to tariff announcements.

A tariff-induced pullback in either channel hits a sector where average carrier margins had already been running thin.

The caveat the headline owes readers

"Experts say" is doing heavy lifting in any headline of this shape. Reuters' trucking file has produced carrier-level reporting before, naming operators, lane economics, and bankruptcy filings. This headline leaves the experts unnamed, the tariff schedule unspecified, and the impact mechanism — volume loss, fuel cost, equipment cost, retaliation risk — unstated.

For a shipper planning a 2025 RFP, the unanswered ones are concrete:

• Which tariff tranches affect which commodities?
• Do experts model a 5% volume hit or a 15% one?
• Is the risk concentrated in cross-border dry van, domestic intermodal conversion, or import dray?

Until those numbers land in the body of the Reuters piece, the headline is a directional signal, not a forecast.

What carriers and shippers should watch next

Three near-term data points will turn a headline into a trade: the next monthly DAT dry van and reefer spot print, the American Trucking Associations' tonnage index release, and any tariff-list amendment out of USTR that touches auto parts, steel-intensive manufactured goods, or Mexican-origin produce — three categories that move meaningfully over the road.

If those prints soften concurrently with the Reuters thesis, expect contract renewals this fall to lean toward carriers more than they did in 2024. If they don't, the headline ages quickly.

For now, the safest read is the unsentimental one: tariffs add a known, hard-to-hedge variable to a market that had already priced in soft demand — and the magnitude of that addition is the question Reuters' experts will need to put numbers behind in the lines that follow.