The Supreme Court struck down the tariffs at the center of President Trump’s trade agenda on February 20, 2026, ruling 6-3 that the law he used to impose them never gave him that power in the first place. Within days, Customs and Border Protection stopped collecting the invalidated tariffs and the administration pivoted to a different statute to keep a similar rate in place. That first replacement has since expired on its own terms, but the tariffs Americans are paying at the register have not meaningfully gone away — they now run through two older, harder-to-challenge laws that together keep the overall U.S. tariff rate near its highest level in decades.
What the Supreme Court Actually Decided
In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a six-justice majority holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act “does not authorize the president to impose tariffs,” rejecting the administration’s argument that IEEPA’s power to “regulate” imports included the power to tax them. The Court leaned on the major questions doctrine, reasoning that a power this sweeping — unused by any president in IEEPA’s roughly 50-year history until 2025 — required explicit authorization from Congress that the statute’s text never provided, according to Skadden’s analysis of the ruling.
Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, dissented, warning that the decision could force the government “to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs.” That prediction is playing out: CBP built a new processing system called CAPE to handle the refund wave, and A&O Shearman’s analysis puts the revenue potentially subject to refund claims at roughly $175 billion, spread across more than 300,000 importers now working through a Court of International Trade docket that is still unresolved.
The refund fight also runs a level deeper than that headline figure suggests. Many importers had already passed IEEPA tariff costs through to customers via surcharges or purchase-order language written when the tariffs looked permanent, and A&O Shearman’s client guidance notes that whoever actually absorbed the cost — not necessarily the importer who wrote the check to CBP — may hold the stronger claim to a refund, depending on how a contract allocated tariff risk. That has pushed companies to audit last year’s contracts for refund-sharing clauses before filing a claim, since both the CBP process and any private contractual right to share in it carry their own deadlines.
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The 150-Day Stopgap That Already Ran Out
The White House did not wait long to respond. On the same day CBP stopped collecting IEEPA duties, President Trump invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a 10% global tariff, framed around an alleged balance-of-payments emergency, and announced plans to raise it to the statute’s 15% ceiling. But Section 122 was always a narrower tool than IEEPA: Congress capped its tariffs at 15% and its duration at 150 days without a separate congressional extension.
That clock ran out before it mattered much. Critics argued a trade deficit is not the same as the “balance-of-payments deficit” the statute requires, and the Court of International Trade agreed in early May 2026, finding the Section 122 tariffs unlawful while the government’s appeal remained pending. Independent of that ruling, the tariffs expired under their own 150-day statutory limit on July 24, 2026, according to Thomson Reuters’ tariff-authority tracker — meaning the tool most news coverage from February associated with the administration’s response is no longer the one actually collecting revenue at the border.
Why Tariffs Are Still Historically High Anyway
The tariffs still landing on imported goods today mostly trace to two authorities the Supreme Court’s ruling never touched. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which lets the Commerce Department act on national-security grounds, now covers steel and aluminum at 50% for most countries and copper at 25%, with roughly 400 additional product codes added to the list in a single month last year. Section 301, run by the U.S. Trade Representative against unfair foreign trade practices, is active against an estimated 76 countries and carries a legal track record stretching back through both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, making it far less vulnerable to the kind of challenge that ended IEEPA tariffs.
Neither authority carries anything like Section 122’s 150-day sunset, and both are described by trade compliance analysts as low litigation risk precisely because they rest on investigative processes — a Commerce Department national-security finding, a USTR unfair-trade determination — that Congress explicitly wrote into the underlying statutes decades ago. The practical result is that the applied U.S. tariff rate has climbed to roughly 11.7%, up from about 1.5% in 2022, even after the single largest tariff program in that increase was declared unconstitutional.
One authority remains untested and unused: Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, which would let the president impose duties of up to 50% on countries found to discriminate against U.S. commerce, subject to a 30-day notice period. No administration has ever invoked it, but trade analysts note that an administration willing to test IEEPA’s boundaries has not ruled out testing Section 338’s next. For a household weighing whether the Supreme Court’s ruling means cheaper imported goods are coming, the honest answer is that the Court closed one door on tariffs and the White House had two others already open.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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