President-elect Donald Trump vows to raise tariffs, deregulate cryptocurrency markets, slash income taxes, deport millions of people and end further development of wind farms during his second term.

As Trump moves into the White House on Monday, Long Island employers and employees are bracing for how these initiatives could impact the region's $206 billion economy.

"At the moment, the Long Island economy looks stable, with wages rising and unemployment near historic lows, though a lot of that stability depends on the economic policies coming out of Washington," said Richard Vogel, an economist and dean of Farmingdale State College’s business school.

He and others said a lot is riding on how Trump goes about implementing change, particularly for hard-pressed consumers whose spending accounts for 70% of economic activity in Nassau and Suffolk counties, based on academic research. Consumer confidence polls show that residents continue to feel weighed down by the cost of groceries, housing and energy.

In the weeks leading up to Monday's inauguration ceremony on Capitol Hill, Newsday spoke with local consumers, business executives, union leaders and economists about what they are looking for from the second Trump presidency in terms of the economy. While they were divided over the extent of the possible policy shifts, all agreed that big changes were coming.

Rhonda Weaver, a retired teacher from Valley Stream, said she expects Trump to dramatically lower consumer prices.

"Food prices are out of sight compared with what they were before COVID" struck in 2020, said Weaver, who voted for Trump in the November election. "I'm tired of having to go to two and three supermarkets just to save a few bucks."

Trump has promised to act swiftly, saying a raft of executive orders will be issued hours after he takes the oath of office. They could include new tariffs on goods imported from China and cracking down on illegal immigration, according to experts.

Other changes, such as sweeping tax reform, altering free trade agreements and more scrutiny of renewable energy projects, could take months or years because they require his cabinet to be in place and legislation to pass a narrowly divided House of Representatives.

STORYWIDGET: bzAGENDA250119_trumpslist

How Long Island fares with Trump's economic agenda remains to be seen. But from Main Street to the corner office, the region's residents know the stakes are high.

Stocking up on imported goods

Eugene Alletto, CEO of Bedgear, said his company is getting creative with sourcing materials in light of potential tariffs levied by the Trump administration.

At Bedgear, a Farmingdale-based producer of pillows, mattresses, sheets and other bedding, executives have stocked up on fabric and manufactured components from Asia. They’ve also identified alternative suppliers in Europe, which may not be targeted by Trump to the same extent as Asia.

"President Trump is going to do the tariffs," said Eugene Alletto, the company’s CEO and founder. "So, we have other sources cued up and ready to go to make the components our factories need."

He said Bedgear has "re-shored" some of its production in the past eight to nine years in response to Trump’s 2018 tariffs on Chinese goods, which President Joe Biden continued, and the shipping bottlenecks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We did bring back jobs to the USA," Alletto said, referring to Bedgear’s factory in Rock Hill, South Carolina, which has a couple hundred employees, and a factory that opened last year in Salt Lake City. He said the latter will have a couple hundred workers by the end of this year while the company headquarters on Sea Lane has 65.

Just under half of Bedgear’s revenue is now derived from the sale of mattresses, pillows and other products that are made domestically. But the high-performance fabrics, mattress protectors and manufactured components that the company requires aren’t produced in the United States, Alletto said.

Unleashing crypto's potential

Craig Rudes (left) and Nick Selvaggio, partners at Long Island Blockchain, discuss their optimism about Trump’s pro-cryptocurrency agenda at their data center in Westbury, N.Y., in January. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin.

While local manufacturing executives, such as Alletto, await the second Trump presidency with some trepidation, leaders of cryptocurrency firms are ecstatic because they expect less regulatory interference.

"Our industry has been driven by fear ... All we’ve been doing is dodging body punches from the Biden Administration," said Craig Rudes, a partner at Long Island Blockchain, which supports private investors and maintains its computer servers in Westbury.

He said cryptocurrency's potential has been stymied by contradictory regulations and open hostility from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Democrats in Congress.

Rudes and his business partner, Nick Selvaggio, said they are optimistic about the next four years, citing Trump’s vow during the campaign to make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the planet."

"With clarity over which agency will guide crypto policy, we can move forward to provide fantastic products that take human society to new heights. There's all this pent-up innovation that Trump will unleash," Rudes said, adding that Long Island Blockchain is developing estate planning software and a "staking platform" to secure investors' crypto assets.

Consumer confidence on the upswing

Crypto executives aren't the only ones buoyed by Trump's victory.

Consumers in Nassau and Suffolk are more upbeat about their immediate financial future. The Siena College Research Institute reported its Index of Consumer Sentiment, based on a poll conducted after the election, was 72.9 points in November locally, up from September's 70.1.

"Sentiment among Republicans is skyrocketing" in anticipation of the second Trump administration, Siena pollster Don Levy said earlier this month. "Although previous elections have seen consumers' mood whiplash by party, today's sentiment swings are twice as intense compared to [the presidential elections of] '16 or '20," he said.

STORYWIDGET: bzAGENDA250119_bios

Statewide, Siena's consumer sentiment index reading for Republicans was 88.4 points compared with Democrats' 74.8. A party breakdown for Long Island wasn't available.

The index measures consumer confidence, and the more confident people are about their finances the more likely they are to spend. Consumer spending accounts for 70% of economic activity locally and nationally, according to economic research papers.

Tax cuts can also spur consumer spending.

Trump has called for exempting tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay from the federal income tax and making permanent the 2017 tax-cut law, which doubled the standard deduction, expanded the Child Tax Credit and reduced levies on the wealthy and corporations, according to his campaign's 20 Core Promises and the Republican Party platform.

However, neither document mentions changes to the $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes, or SALT, on federal income tax returns, which was enacted in 2017 and expires this year.

John A. Rizzo, an economist and Stony Brook University professor, said, removing the SALT cap "translates into a lot more income for Long Islanders because you can deduct your entire property tax bill. ... That would certainly stimulate consumption."

Union worries

Taxation was a key focus of the campaign platforms of Trump and the GOP, but there was no mention of unions.

Still, labor activists recalled the antipathy of the first Trump presidency and pointed to Project 2025, a 922-page manifesto written by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Project 2025 calls for making it easier for a union to be decertified as the employees’ representative and to require secret-ballot elections for determining the outcome of all union organizing campaigns instead of sometimes relying on the number of union cards signed by potential members. Project 2025 also would end project labor agreements and the Davis-Bacon Act, both of which set minimum pay rates on construction projects.

Trump distanced himself from the document during the campaign, saying, "We have nothing to do with Project '25." But two of his 12 nominees for economic-related jobs were coauthors: Paul Atkins for SEC chairman and Russell T. Vought for director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Leeana Lee, a shift supervisor at the Starbucks on Seventh Street in Garden City, outside the store she helped unionize last year. Lee plans to push back against policies that she says could threaten union efforts under Trump’s second term.

Leeana Lee, who helped bring a union to her Starbucks store, said she's preparing for the worse and hoping for the best from the second Trump presidency.

"We’ve got to make the group bigger by trying to unionize as many stores as we can — to the point where we’re not a voice that [Trump] can ignore," she said.

About a year ago, Lee helped organize the Starbucks on Seventh Street in Garden City, where employees voted 7 to 3 in favor of joining the Workers United New York New Jersey Regional Board, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. She is now a shift supervisor at the store.

Lee, who lives in New Hyde Park, said she plans to work with state and local officials to counteract the policies coming from Washington.

"We need to look to our local political leaders, our state leaders to try to reverse some of it," she said, referring to the Trump and Project 2025 proposals. "There may be loopholes in federal law that allow New York legislators to act, to put community first."

STORYWIDGET: bzAGENDA250119_project25

Employment for hundreds of unionized construction workers would be lost if Trump follows through on his promise to end further development of offshore wind farms.

"We’re going to try to have a policy where no windmills are being built," Trump said at a news conference earlier this month, calling the turbines an environmental "disaster" that are "driving the whales crazy."

The Long Island Power Authority commissioned the first wind farm in federal waters, South Fork Wind, which was completed off Montauk Point last year. The larger Sunrise Wind, also off Montauk Point, and Empire Wind, off Long Beach, are both under construction.

Less focus on offshore wind

Billy Haugland II, CEO of Haugland Group, at the company’s Melville facility. The company, which has won multimillion-dollar contracts for wind farm projects, is preparing for potential shifts in energy policies under the Trump administration.

The Melville-based Haugland Group LLC won multimillion-dollar contracts for onshore construction of the South Fork and Sunrise farms as well as providing unionized electricians for Sunrise’s offshore construction. The Sunrise contract is valued at $210 million, according to CEO Billy Haugland II.

"I’m sleeping at night when it comes to Sunrise Wind because it's successfully employing hundreds of Long Island and New York residents and union workers," he said. "I do not believe that the decision-makers in Washington will look to hurt union workers."

In September, Haugland Group expects to begin laying high-voltage electrical transmission cable for Empire Wind's substation onshore.

In terms of the future, Haugland said his company, with more than 1,500 employees, has a diverse portfolio of construction projects in energy and infrastructure. It operates in 13 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

"While we will have to adjust [to the Trump administration's priorities], there's still going to be plenty of work for us to do." he said. "We may no longer have [workers] out there on the wind turbines. Instead, they'll be on other power generation projects because it all comes back to the increased demand for electricity."

Deportation fears

Trump’s pledge in his core promises to “carry out the largest deportation in American history" of undocumented immigrants has a wide range of employers and their employees on edge. Many immigrants and the groups that fight for them expect the second Trump presidency to go beyond a wall at the southern border, a ban on Muslims entering the country and other actions taken by Trump in his first term.

"They're going to find ways to barrel through the barriers that stopped them the first time," said Minerva Perez, executive director of OLA of Eastern Long Island (Organización Latino Americana), a nonprofit that serves Latinos on the East End.

She predicted the anxiety and worry that some OLA clients are feeling, regardless of their legal status, will negatively impact their mental health and that of their children.

"People fall in on themselves, and we know that's part of [Trump's] plan," Perez said. "People get so nervous that they just take themselves out. That could be self deportation. It could be harm that you do to yourself."

She also said immigrant labor "is the fuel" of East End businesses in agriculture, construction, landscaping, domestic service and hospitality — and each would be negatively impacted if the number of available workers shrinks.

Across Long Island, the owners of hotels, catering halls, restaurants and other hospitality businesses reported increased numbers of employees who are anxious about the future.

“There is a fear with some employees that they could be deported, even if they’re legal, or that somebody in their family is deported and everyone has to leave because they don’t want to break up the family,” said Dorothy Roberts, president of the Long Island Hospitality Association.

The association's members, along with entertainment venues, museums, beaches and other attractions, make up the region's tourism industry. Together, they are responsible for more than $6.6 billion in visitor spending per year and 100,000 jobs, based on data from the research firm Tourism Economics.

Roberts said her members don't know how Trump's new immigration initiatives would affect their ability to retain and hire workers.

“So many things have been thrown out there that we just don’t know what the actual policy is going to be and how it’s going to be implemented,” Roberts said. “Most of us are taking a wait-and-see approach."

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