Local experts and officials don’t have a clear picture of how the Trump administration’s tariff policy will affect the Port of Virginia and the many thousands of jobs connected to it, but ports across the country are bracing for a significant slowdown in traffic.
However severe those impacts are, they will be felt between May and July, according to Vinod Agarwal, a professor of economics at Old Dominion University and deputy director for ODU’s Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy.
The tariffs are levied on “just about every trade lane we have,” said Joe Harris, a spokesperson for the Port of Virginia, but without consistency in the tariffs themselves, it’s difficult to know what to expect.
Relaying the words of Port of Virginia CEO Stephen Edwards, Harris said, “very plainly, it’s hard to know.”
“We know the trade lanes that are most affected by tariffs, but it’s really difficult to gauge overall impact to POV in terms of volume, ship calls, etc,” Harris said in an email.
The port had its second-busiest March on record, according to Harris, which Agarwal said is “simply because everyone knew the tariffs would be taking place in April and if you’re in the business of importing goods you want to make sure they arrive in time before the tariffs go into effect.”
“Here’s what I know: tariffs should lead to a decrease in imports at almost all U.S. ports, not just the Port of Virginia,” Agarwal said. “The effect of the tariffs has not yet been seen in as much detail as is likely to be seen in the next couple of months.
“Our expectation is the tariffs will lead to increases in prices, the higher prices will result in decreased demand for these products, so we should see a decline in imports which will of course affect the Port of Virginia,” he continued.
Based on 2021 data, the Port of Virginia accounts for $153 billion added to the United State economy, supports 1.29 million jobs and employs about 565,000 people in Virginia.
Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, which has an economic impact of $311 billion in 2021, told Bloomberg last week that they’ve seen roughly 33% drop off in their import volume over the last few weeks.
“CEOs are telling me ‘hit the pause button, i’m not going to import anymore at these kinds of prices,” Seroka said. “Hiring? Off the table for right now. Capital investment? Paused. The retailers are telling me that realistically – even with the 10% (tariff) – ‘I’m going to have to pass (the cost) on to the consumers.’”
He said the tariffs could cause truckers who are used to hauling four or five containers in a week could be hauling two or three, and said dockworkers “are no longer going to see overtime and double shifts they’re going to probably work less than a traditional work week starting right off the bat.”
A presentation by Apollo Global Management lays out a timeline similar to Agarwal’s. Taking into account the transport time for goods from China, Apollo estimates U.S. consumers could start seeing shortages on store shelves by mid- to late-May as trucking demand “comes to a halt,” that there will be layoffs in the trucking and retail industries in late May and early June, and that there will be a recession by this summer.
In his courses over recent weeks, Agarwal has coincidentally been covering international trade for his students. What he teaches them, he said, is that tariffs on imports are disruptive to markets.
“(A domestic producer) who has not been producing much stock now has to collect the labor force, plan the machinery, train the individuals to produce the product – it’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight,” he said. “In the meantime everybody is paying a higher price.”
Originally Published: May 6, 2025 at 11:09 AM EDT