HELENA — On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff policies, but Trump announced he planned to reinstate tariffs using a different mechanism just hours later. Business leaders in Montana say that means this could only be a beginning, not an end, to uncertainty that businesses in the state have been experiencing due to tariffs.
“If you think back over the last 12 months now, we've gone from no tariffs to high tariffs to low tariffs to no tariffs again,” said Todd O’Hair, president and CEO of the Montana Chamber of Commerce. “One of the things that we advocate for is stability and consistency, both in our tax environment and in our regulatory environment – and we're getting no certainty in the situation that we are today.”
O’Hair says Montana’s economy is particularly affected by tariffs.
“Given that the state of Montana has more beef cows and more wheat than we have people, we are wholly dependent upon an import and export sort of market,” he said.
O’Hair says many of the Chamber’s member businesses have made an effort to buy what they can within the U.S., but there isn’t always a good option to do that. He says they generally haven’t seen businesses making broader structural changes in response to tariffs.
“We know of a number of businesses that resisted passing on costs for a long period of time, hoping that this thing would settle out and there’d be a little bit more certainty and a little bit more clarity in the market as we go forward,” he said. “Ultimately, we've seen a number of those businesses had to pass on some of those increased tariff costs, just because there's just no other options for some of the components and some of the supply chains that meet their needs.”
With Trump already planning to find a new way to execute his tariff policies, O’Hair said the coming months will be tough for business owners trying to decide when, where and if they want to invest.
