West Coast lawmakers and port officials issued stark warnings Thursday about the growing economic risks for businesses and consumers from a full-blown trade war.

“Small businesses … are telling me the situation is as dire for them as it was during COVID,” said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, speaking about the impacts of President Donald Trump’s import tariffs at an online press briefing with fellow senators from Oregon and California and port commissioners from Seattle, Tacoma and Long Beach, Calif.

“It’s going to be devastating,” added Dick Marzano, commissioner with the Port of Tacoma, which is bracing later this month for a major fall in traffic due to import tariffs, especially on Chinese goods. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Marzano.

West Coast companies that depend on exports, meanwhile, are already losing business to foreign buyers whose governments have retaliated with tariffs on U.S. goods.

Among those is Bob’s Red Mill, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based producer of high-end natural foods, which said “their orders overseas are already beginning to dry up,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

Thursday’s warnings come barely a day after the Senate narrowly failed to pass a largely symbolic measure, introduced by Wyden, to end the national emergency Trump has invoked to authorize his tariffs.

It also follows a week of worrying economic data and growing concerns that trade tensions, again especially with China, which faces a 145% U.S. tariff, could lead to a full-blown recession. Tariffs are effectively a tax on imported goods that U.S. companies typically must either absorb or pass along to customers.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy shrunk by 0.3% in the first three months of the year, compared to the same period last year.

It was the first quarterly decline in three years, and a sharp downshift from the final quarter of 2024, when the economy expanded by just over 2%. Consumer spending rose 1.8% in the first quarter of 2025, versus 2024, down from a 4% increase in the final quarter of 2024.

Economists say the precise links between tariffs and economic measures such as quarterly growth are complicated. Democrats, however, were ready to blame the slowing growth entirely on Trump’s trade policy.

“We went from months of strong economic growth and predictions of more growth to come, to a shrinking economy, all thanks to Trump and his tariffs,” Murray said Thursday, adding that “one economically illiterate president … is single-handedly pushing this nation towards a painful Republican recession.”

Trump’s initial tariffs were rolled out Feb. 1 and quickly led to escalating rounds of retaliatory tariffs from other nations. While Trump partly suspended tariffs on many nations, which now face just a 10% tax, he ramped up the tariffs on many Chinese imports to 145%.

The tariff debate has been punctuated by bleak media coverage of empty West Coast ports and grim forecasts, especially for West Coast ports.

Foreign exporters, notably in China, have canceled sailings of cargo vessels bound for U.S. ports due to the new tariffs.

Between April 1 and April 27, the volume of containers on vessels departing Chinese ports for Seattle and Tacoma fell around 17%, according to SONAR, a freight market data platform. Departing container volumes also dipped last April, though only by around half as much.

China makes up around 40% of cargo imported through the ports of Seattle and Tacoma.

Declines are also materializing at other West Coast ports, including at the Port of Long Beach, said Mario Cordero, CEO of that Los Angeles-area port.

“Shipping lines have already canceled 34 sailing that would have called at the Port of Long Beach over the next two months,” Cordero said Thursday.

Because vessels bound from China take several weeks to reach West Coast ports, the full impact of those cancellations is still weeks away.

For the month of April, the number of arriving container vessels berthing at Seattle and Tacoma was down just 7%, to 58, compared to April 2024, according to data from the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound, an industry association. The number of arriving vessels carrying automobiles declined by nearly 21%.

Thursday afternoon, the ports of Seattle and Tacoma had around a dozen cargo vessels berthed or at anchor, according to the website Marine Tracker, although it wasn’t clear where all the vessels were from or were bound.

But port officials expect to see the much larger impacts of cancellations starting in mid-May.

The ports of Seattle and Tacoma, whose marine cargo operations are overseen through the Northwest Seaport Alliance, anticipate a decline in container imports of around 40%, said Ryan Calkins, Port of Seattle commissioner.

That decline could have a direct impact on port-related employment for jobs like longshore workers and truck drivers. “If we’ve got a 40% drop in vessel calls or container traffic, we’re going to have the roughly equivalent drop in the number of longshore hours, the number of truck trips,” Calkins said.

More broadly, any disruption in cargos will directly affect companies that depend on imports or sell to foreign buyers.

Marzano, with the Port of Tacoma, said local exporters are already scrambling to find new buyers for products they can no longer sell into countries, like China, that imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

Oregon’s grass seed farmers have estimated that about half their exports, valued at nearly $200 million, are being cancelled, said Wyden.

Democrats vow to keep pushing Congress to assert its authority and rein in the president’s tariff powers.

Though any such legislation seems bound to fail — Trump has threatened a veto — Democrats clearly see tariffs as a way to divide Republicans over an issue that has created unhappiness even among Republican voters.

The fact that all but three Republican Senators voted against Wednesday’s tariff bill “is a dangerous and deliberate decision by Republicans to enable Trump’s pro recession agenda and higher taxes on every American,” Murray said.

Still, even if Trump were to drop the tariffs tomorrow, it could take weeks or months to restore shipping volumes. The global supply chain is “not a light switch they can just turn on and off,” said Marzano.

Making the stakes even higher, the looming risks of a trade slowdown comes as many U.S. retailers must decide on their orders for the Christmas season.

Brittney Geleynse, owner of Clover Toys in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, said some of her suppliers are already warning of tariff “surcharges.”

As a small business owners Geleynse prefers not to order products far in advance, in part because it ties up so much of her limited cash flow in inventory.

But with so much tariff uncertainty, she’s feeling pressure to buy early. You “don’t want to be unprepared and not have anything (on your shelves) or have to jack your prices up so high that consumers are going to alternatives.”

And, like many U.S. business owners, Geleynse is struggling with how to communicate to her customers the reasons for any price increase.

One idea is to put the tariff portion on on the receipt; another is to put it right on the price tag.

Geleynse knows it’s sensitive issue at a moment when tariffs and inflation are politically supercharged.

But she also thinks her Seattle customer base is “informed enough to know that we aren’t doing this simply to gouge them.” Tariffs, Geleynse said, are a cost increase that’s “not within our realm of control.”

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