US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s sweeping global tariffs plan

The US Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from enforcing broad global tariffs that he had introduced using emergency powers. The decision, which could have major effects on international trade and the global economy, rejected one of Trump’s most controversial claims of presidential authority.

In a 6–3 verdict written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court agreed with a lower court that Trump had gone beyond his legal limits. The justices said the 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not give the president unlimited power to impose tariffs. They explained that such major economic decisions must be clearly approved by Congress.

The ruling relied on the “major questions” doctrine, which says the president cannot take actions with huge political or economic impact without clear permission from lawmakers. This same legal principle was also used in past cases involving policies by former President Joe Biden.

Trump has long used tariffs as a key part of his economic and foreign policy, especially during global trade tensions. However, several businesses and 12 US states challenged these tariffs in court, arguing that Trump acted without proper authority.

Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh — disagreed with the majority decision. Meanwhile, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both appointed by Trump, joined Roberts and the court’s liberal justices in ruling against the tariffs.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, previously had backed Trump in a series of other decisions issued on an emergency basis since he returned to the presidency in January 2025 after his policies were impeded by lower courts.

Trump’s tariffs were forecast to generate over the next decade trillions of dollars in revenue for the United States, which possesses the world’s largest economy.

Trump’s administration has not provided tariff collection data since December 14. But Penn-Wharton Budget Model economists estimated on Friday that the amount collected in Trump’s tariffs based on IEEPA stood at more than $175 billion. And that amount likely would need to be refunded with a Supreme Court ruling against the IEEPA-based tariffs.

The US Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to issue taxes and tariffs. But Trump instead turned to a statutory authority by invoking IEEPA to impose the tariffs on nearly every US trading partner without the approval of Congress.

Trump has imposed some additional tariffs under other laws that are not at issue in this case. Based on government data from October to mid-December, those represent about a third of the revenue from Trump-imposed tariffs.

IEEPA lets a president regulate commerce in a national emergency. Trump became the first president to use IEEPA to impose tariffs, one of the many ways he has aggressively pushed the boundaries of executive authority since he returned to office in areas as varied as his crackdown on immigration, the firing of federal agency officials, domestic military deployments and military operations overseas.

Trump described the tariffs as vital for US economic security, predicting that the country would be defenceless and ruined without them. Trump in November, told reporters that without his tariffs, “the rest of the world would laugh at us because they’ve used tariffs against us for years and took advantage of us.” Trump said the United States was abused by other countries, including China, the second-largest economy.

After the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in November, Trump said he would consider alternatives if it ruled against him on tariffs, telling reporters that “we’ll have to develop a ‘game two’ plan.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other administration officials said the United States would invoke other legal justifications to retain as many of Trump’s tariffs as possible.

Among others, these include a statutory provision that permits tariffs on imported goods that threaten US national security and another that allows retaliatory actions including tariffs against trading partners that the Office of the US Trade Representative determines have used unfair trade practices against American exporters.

None of these alternatives offered the flexibility and blunt-force dynamics that IEEPA provided Trump, and may not be able to replicate the full scope of his tariffs in a timely fashion.

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Trump’s ability to impose tariffs instantaneously on any trading partner’s goods under the aegis of some form of declared national emergency raised his leverage over other countries. It brought world leaders scrambling to Washington to secure trade deals that often included pledges of billions of dollars in investments or other offers of enhanced market access for US companies.

But Trump’s use of tariffs as a cudgel in US foreign policy has succeeded in antagonising numerous countries, including those long considered among the closest US allies.

IEEPA historically had been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets, not to impose tariffs. The law does not specifically mention the word tariffs. Trump’s Justice Department had argued that IEEPA allows tariffs by authorising the president to “regulate” imports to address emergencies.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if all current tariffs stay in place, including the IEEPA-based duties, they would generate about $300 billion annually over the next decade.

Total US net customs duty receipts reached a record $195 billion in fiscal 2025, which ended on September 30, according to US Treasury Department data.

On April 2 on a date Trump labelled “Liberation Day,” the president announced what he called “reciprocal” tariffs on goods imported from most US trading partners, invoking IEEPA to address what he called a national emergency related to US trade deficits, though the United States already had run trade deficits for decades.

In February and March of 2025, Trump invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, citing the trafficking of the often-abused painkiller fentanyl and illicit drugs into the United States as a national emergency.

Trump has wielded his tariffs to extract concessions and renegotiate trade deals, and as a weapon to punish countries that draw his ire on non-trade political matters. These have ranged from Brazil’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, India’s purchases of Russian oil that help fund Russia’s war in Ukraine, and an anti-tariffs ad by Canada’s Ontario province.

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IEEPA was passed by Congress and signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter. In passing the measure, Congress placed additional limits on the president’s authority compared to a predecessor law.

The cases on tariffs before the justices involved three lawsuits.

The Washington-based US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with five small businesses that import goods in one challenge, and the states of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont in another.

Separately, a Washington-based federal judge sided with a family-owned toy company called Learning Resources.