It was a bad week for Ben Coryell, who runs a wilderness guiding company in Golden, Colo.
He got several calls from customers who wanted to cancel their climbing courses and mountaineering expeditions over the summer, often citing second thoughts about big purchases as the Trump administration has thrown the economy into turmoil with eye-watering tariffs.
At the same time, Mr. Coryell is wondering how long his business, Golden Mountain Guides, can continue to offer those trips, as personnel cuts at the National Park Service have held up the processing of the permits he needs to operate along high-demand routes. And with those cuts leaving fewer rangers on patrol, he fears that unlicensed operators could run amok.
So far he hasn’t laid anyone off, but it seems increasingly likely that he may have to.
“It’s really starting to feel like a lot of the operations we’ve depended on might have to be bumped for the next number of years until we can find a healthy status quo,” he said.
Thousands of entrepreneurs are finding themselves in similar positions as they confront the blizzard of changes from Washington over the last two and a half months. Funding freezes, staffing cuts to federal agencies and an immigration crackdown — along with, of course, tariffs — are throwing many into turmoil, with little certainty about how to proceed.
“It’s feeling like a tornado to small-business owners,” said Natalie Madeira Cofield, chief executive of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, which supports initiatives to help companies with fewer than 10 employees. “This is an unprecedented moment.”
The last few years have been a whirlwind for this part of the private sector, which is critical to feeding the American economy with new ideas and competitive vigor. The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a boom of business formation, and many of those start-ups continued to thrive in new niches, with modern practices.
Then, a surge in inflation, followed by a run-up in interest rates, stretched many small enterprises to their limit. Small firms have fewer employees on average than they did before the pandemic, according to the payroll platform Homebase; hiring declined 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from a year earlier. And data from the accounting software company QuickBooks shows that the set of businesses with fewer than 10 workers started shrinking rapidly in March 2024.
The economist who compiles those numbers, Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Chicago, also found in a working paper released last month that small businesses started to run up their credit card bills in 2021, incurring heavy interest payments. As interest rates rose in 2022, revenues declined and more businesses became delinquent.
“Small businesses don’t have internal capital to rely on,” Dr. Akcigit said. “As a result, if there’s any financial difficulty, they’re the first group to be left out of the credit market.”
Nonetheless, optimism spiked to record levels following the election of Donald J. Trump last year, according to a long-running survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small and midsize companies.
Holly Wade, executive director of the organization’s research center, said the exuberance stemmed from her members’ expectations of favorable tax policy and relaxed regulations. Although that optimism reading faded in February, she said, Congress and the White House are so far following through on their promises. Ms. Wade cited as one example the Treasury Department’s announcement that it would not enforce a new law requiring corporate entities to disclose their true owners, with fines for noncompliance.
“Those are some really early wins by small-business owners on an issue that impacted most of them with the regulatory paperwork burden,” Ms. Wade said.
The administration agreed. “President Trump is quickly cleaning up Biden’s mess by rolling back 10 regulations for every new regulation, unleashing American energy, cutting taxes and leveling the playing field for American businesses,” said Taylor Rogers, an assistant White House press secretary.
But not every move has been as welcomed.
The first blow was a freeze on grants and contracts — especially for veteran-owned businesses, which often do most or all of their business with the federal government. According to Nancy Langer, who runs a consulting firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions for government contractors, some are already going bankrupt.
“I don’t think they realized that it would have such an eviscerating effect on veteran-owned businesses, but it has,” Ms. Langer said. “The entire small-business community in the federal marketplace is recognizing that this is a whole other paradigm.”
Now, new opportunities are evaporating, too.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that substantially reduced the share of federal purchasing dollars that go toward small and disadvantaged businesses. (The Biden administration had raised the target to 15 percent, three times the statutory minimum, and achieved record levels of procurement with small businesses.)
Rachel Klein’s production company, Fire Starter Studios, had come to depend on those contracts in recent years as the Los Angeles film industry lost steam. As a small, woman-owned business, Fire Starter had a slight competitive edge when bidding for short documentaries, public-service announcements and promotional videos for federal clients.
But in the last few months, those solicitations have dried up. A $200 million contract for promoting the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement work skipped competitive bidding and went to two Republican ad makers. With no improvement on the horizon, Ms. Klein made the difficult decision to sell the sound stage that she built.
“It’s more than just, ‘Are you making money anymore?’” Ms. Klein said. “It’s the absolute stress monkey that is now hanging around my neck, banging me on the head, going, ‘You get it! You don’t get it! You’re broke! You’re not broke!’”
Along with trying to lift small businesses through procurement, the federal government has aided them with loans, technical assistance and networking. Parts of that supportive ecosystem are now at risk as well.
The Small Business Administration, for example, has announced plans to cut its work force by 43 percent. While the agency had expanded its head count significantly over the past five years to administer pandemic-era relief programs, shedding that many people — partly through voluntary buyouts — could strain the agency’s flagship loan program.
The Small Business Administration has also become increasingly important in dispensing funds after natural disasters. But the primary agency responsible for relief is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Mr. Trump has proposed eliminating. That unnerves Janice Jucker, a co-owner of Three Brothers Bakery in Houston, who has needed federal assistance to recover from multiple major storms.
“For me, FEMA is all about getting my community up and running so they can shop at my shop,” Ms. Jucker said. She is pushing Texas legislators to pick up the slack.
Some federal agencies have been targeted for near elimination.
In mid-March, the White House issued an executive order aimed at stripping down the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, an office at the Treasury Department that supports lending to disadvantaged people, businesses and places. The office and its funding have long had bipartisan support, and senators from both parties rallied to save it.
But Mark Pinsky, who has worked in community development banking for decades and now runs a nonprofit that seeks to direct low-interest financing to underserved areas, sees the political environment as deflating banks’ willingness to take part after years of steady growth.
“The changes are like a glacial pulling back,” Mr. Pinsky said. “It’s not a tsunami. But it’s hard to reverse direction.”
The White House has been more effective in all but eliminating another entity named in that executive order: the Minority Business Development Agency, which the Biden administration had reinvigorated with new funding through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. It is now down to three staff members, with several dozen others on administrative leave.
The small office had acted mostly through its regional partners, which hosted conferences and provided counseling to small disadvantaged businesses. Jesse Villarreal, who owns TrooperUSA, a 160-person janitorial firm in Mesa, Ariz., said he met clients, lenders, and partners for joint ventures through the agency’s events.
“I have the good fortune of being on the successful side because of their support,” Mr. Villarreal said. “Now the federal government’s doing away with the program. We’re very concerned because we do need people to help us.”
The latest hurdle for small businesses is the Trump administration’s steep tariffs imposed on imports from nearly every country.
Although small businesses are less likely to export than larger ones, they do depend on imports, and tend to have less flexibility in changing their suppliers. Sudden new expenses can force them to cut back in other areas or even to fall behind on bills.
Fort Hamilton, a rye and gin distillery in Brooklyn, is relatively lucky — it sources its grain from New York State. But its glass bottles come from India, its elaborate labels from a specialty printer in Britain and its corks from Mexico or Argentina. Switching any of those would require expensive new molds and designs, even if a domestic supplier could be found.
So instead, Alex Clark, a co-founder, decided to order as much as he could store ahead of the tariffs — about four months’ supply of bottles and a year’s worth of labels. But spending that cash meant he couldn’t add a sales person to his 11-member staff, which he had been planning.
“We think there’s plenty of opportunities for continued growth, but it is going to take more bodies,” Mr. Clark said. “And it’s difficult to put the body in when you don’t know what the future looks like.”