Trump Imposed an Estimated $166 Billion in Tariffs Under a Law That Authorized None

An Estimated $166 Billion Under the Wrong Law

On February 1, 2025, Donald Trump signed executive orders taxing imports from Canada, Mexico and China.¹²³ In April he signed another, taxing imports from trading partners worldwide.⁴ He rested them all on an emergency law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA.¹²³⁴ American importers paid the duties while the litigation ran.⁵ On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held, six to three, that IEEPA did not authorize presidential tariffs.⁶⁷ The duties assessed under it, a trade court later reported, came to an estimated $166 billion.⁸

That is the charge: Trump exercised a taxing power Congress had not given him.⁶⁹ The Constitution assigns the taxing power to Congress.⁹ Chief Justice Roberts wrote: "The President asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope."⁶

The trade court described the IEEPA duties as unlawfully collected.⁸ Its estimate, taken from a government declaration, covered 53 million entries involving roughly 330,000 importers.⁸ FishUSA, one of the small businesses that sued in the Court of International Trade, alleged that the tariffs had made it delay shipments and that it had paused production of some products, supported by its executive’s declaration.¹⁰ The trade court found those types of injuries sufficient to establish standing.¹⁰

Three Countries, Then Trading Partners Worldwide

The program reached the world in about two months, at rates Trump kept changing.¹⁴⁶ The February orders cited drug trafficking.¹²³ On April 2, Trump declared another emergency, this one over persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, and ordered a 10 percent baseline tariff on imports from trading partners worldwide.⁴ The order set higher rates for 57 named trading partners and exempted specified goods, including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and energy products.¹¹⁴

Within a week, Trump raised the China rates twice; the combined effective rate on most Chinese goods reached 145 percent.⁶¹²¹³ He later reduced rates, suspended increases and moved goods into and out of the program; in November 2025 he exempted beef, fruit, coffee and tea.⁶ He also announced Canadian tariff increases in posts of his own, first on steel and aluminum over Ontario's electricity surcharge and, later, over an advertisement.¹⁴¹⁵ No previous President had read IEEPA to confer tariff power, the Supreme Court observed.⁶

The Courts Rejected the Power; the Stay Kept Collections Running

Three courts in turn rejected the power Trump claimed, and collection continued while they did.¹⁰⁵⁶ Five small businesses and twelve states sued in the Court of International Trade.⁶ On May 28, 2025, it rejected all three categories of IEEPA tariff orders.¹⁰

Opinion, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. United States, Slip Op. 25-66, Conclusion¹⁰

The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders.

On August 29, the Federal Circuit agreed, seven to four, that the tariffs were unauthorized.⁵ But it overturned the order blocking them for all importers.⁵ Its stay kept collection running for nearly nine months, from the May 28 ruling to Trump's termination order of February 20, 2026.⁵¹⁶

Six Supreme Court justices then held that power to regulate imports did not include power to tax them.⁶⁷ The Supreme Court also vacated the parallel Washington district-court judgment and directed dismissal of that case for lack of jurisdiction.⁶

Opinion of the Court, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. 229⁶

Absent from this lengthy list of powers is any mention of tariffs or duties.

The Cost Fell Mainly on American Firms and Consumers

A tariff raises revenue for the Treasury by taxing domestic importers, as the Supreme Court explained.⁶ New York Fed researchers, using import data through November 2025, estimated that nearly 90 percent of the economic burden of the 2025 tariffs fell on U.S. firms and consumers.¹⁷ The American share declined late in the year as foreign exporters absorbed more of the cost.¹⁷

A New York Fed consumer-price study, revised in September 2026, estimated that about 26 percent of the tariff increase passed through to consumer prices.¹⁸ It compared goods facing larger and smaller tariff increases, holding economy-wide conditions fixed.¹⁸ Both studies cover the whole 2025 tariff program, not the IEEPA duties alone.¹⁷¹⁸ They show that the harm extended beyond the companies writing checks at the border.¹⁸

Most of the Money Returned; Thousands of Importers Still Needed Relief

The Supreme Court issued no refund remedy.⁶ The trade court ordered Customs to recalculate import duty bills without the IEEPA taxes beginning March 4, 2026.⁸ Two days later, the government acknowledged its obligation to refund them, and Customs built an automated system called CAPE.⁸

Judge Richard Eaton's October 8 opinion, citing a government declaration, reported about $126 billion in duties plus interest refunded by October 2, 2026.⁸ He praised CAPE's success and described the refunds as more than 75 percent of the $166 billion in unlawful duties, plus interest.⁸ In March 2026, the opinion recalled, interest was estimated to be accruing at about $650 million per month, based on a roughly 4.5 percent rate.⁸

Tens of thousands of importers still risked missing refunds, Eaton warned.⁸ CAPE excluded shipments whose duty bills Customs had finalized more than 90 days earlier if the importer had not sued.⁸ The court believed many small importers would never apply because of the cost, effort or lack of awareness.⁸ If CAPE stopped functioning then, Eaton estimated, about $30 billion in unlawful duties would remain in the Treasury.⁸

In the same opinion he certified a class: importers of record who had paid the challenged duties between February 1, 2025, and February 19, 2026, and had not separately sued to recover IEEPA duty payments may pursue refunds together.⁸ The government opposed it, arguing that the request came too late and failed the class-action requirements.⁸ It insisted that those older duty bills required individual court orders, while not objecting to those orders in more than 4,000 individual cases.⁸ Eaton rejected its objections.⁸ The class still awaited a merits ruling and an injunction implementing the law already decided in its favor.⁸ A separate government appeal, over whether the recalculation order covers all affected shipments, remained undecided when he wrote.⁸

His Goods-Deficit Goal Fell Short in the First Annual Report

Trump's April order named persistent annual goods trade deficits as the emergency and blamed them for manufacturing decline and vulnerable supply chains.⁴ In its February 19, 2026 annual release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the 2025 goods deficit grew 2.1 percent, to $1,240.9 billion.¹⁹ The combined goods-and-services deficit improved slightly, falling $2.1 billion because the services surplus increased.¹⁹ On that first annual accounting, the goods-deficit measure Trump's order targeted moved in the wrong direction.⁴¹⁹

The latest release available on October 10, 2026, published October 6, put the August goods-and-services deficit at $105.6 billion, up $12.7 billion from July.²⁰ The year-to-date combined deficit was 19.9 percent smaller than in the same period of 2025.²⁰ These totals do not isolate the emergency tariffs' effect; they set the results beside Trump's stated goal.¹⁹²⁰

The Strongest Defense: Broad Words, Precedent, and Compliance

The strongest defense is that Trump adopted a plausible reading of a broad emergency statute, litigated it through the courts, and complied when he lost.²¹⁵¹⁶ His government argued that IEEPA's power to regulate importation included tariffs, a less drastic instrument than an embargo.²¹⁵ It also invoked Nixon's 1971 import surcharge: a specialized appellate court had upheld that limited tariff under IEEPA's predecessor, which used the same operative words.⁶

Four Federal Circuit judges and three Supreme Court justices accepted that reading.⁵⁶ Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, framed the disagreement this way:⁶

Dissenting opinion, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. 229⁶

the President checked the wrong statutory box by relying on IEEPA rather than another statute to impose these tariffs.

Congress does authorize presidential tariffs.²²²³ Section 232 expressly addresses duties and requires a Commerce Department national-security investigation; the Supreme Court upheld that delegation in 1976, and the trade court rejected a constitutional challenge to it in 2019.²²²⁴²⁵

Two more facts favor the defense: the Supreme Court decided what the statute meant and did not hold these tariffs unconstitutional, and Trump obtained judicial stays, collected under them, and ended the IEEPA duties on the day the Supreme Court ruled.⁶⁵¹⁶

The majority rejected the IEEPA defense: a single limited ruling about the predecessor statute did not establish a settled meaning Congress had incorporated into IEEPA.⁶ Chief Justice Roberts also distinguished Nixon's surcharge as limited in amount, duration and scope.⁶ Foreign-affairs authority did not fill the gap: the government conceded that Trump had no inherent peacetime tariff power.⁶

The Day He Lost, Trump Signed Another Import Tax

On February 20, 2026, Trump signed an order ending the IEEPA duties but retaining the emergency declarations, and a proclamation imposing a 10 percent import surcharge from February 24, subject to product exclusions.¹⁶²³ This time he used Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which caps the rate at 15 percent and the term at 150 days unless Congress extends it.²³ Customs' July 5 table listed $31.06 billion in replacement duties assessed for fiscal year 2026.²⁶

The trade court’s May 2025 IEEPA opinion had itself read Section 122 to cover tariffs responding to trade deficits, subject to that statute’s limits.¹⁰ On May 7, the trade court ruled two to one that the surcharge was unauthorized because the statute's balance-of-payments deficit differed from the trade and current-account deficits Trump invoked.²⁷ Its injunction protected only Washington state and two importers, and it dismissed the other states for lack of standing.²⁷ Dissenting Judge Timothy Stanceu disagreed with the majority’s reading of Section 122 and would have denied both summary judgment motions and allowed further responses.²⁷

On June 11, the Federal Circuit stayed the injunction, concluding that the government had made a sufficient showing that it was likely to succeed on the merits.²⁸ In granting the stay, it reasoned that refunds with interest would reduce payment-related harm if the surcharge were ultimately held unlawful; it did not decide the merits.²⁸ The surcharge expired July 24.²³²⁶ As of September 18, the last filing on a public docket copy, the appeal was undecided.²⁹

In April 2026, under Section 232, Trump tied lower drug-tariff rates to companies' pricing and U.S. production commitments.³⁰ On July 23, the day before the surcharge expired, Trump directed the Trade Representative to impose Section 301 duties after investigations of 60 economies.³¹³² They took effect July 24: some rates were 10 or 12.5 percent, with credits producing smaller or zero additional duties for specified economies and product exemptions.³¹³² Importers sued that day; an August 13 order coordinated the cases without deciding their merits.³³³⁴

Why This Belongs in an Impeachment Case

The Constitution gives Congress the power to lay taxes and duties, and Article II provides impeachment and removal for high crimes and misdemeanors.⁹ The House's published impeachment list and the Judiciary Committee's survey offer no tariff-abuse precedent.³⁵³⁶³⁷ The committee rejected, 12 to 26, a charge over Nixon's authorizing and concealing the Cambodia bombing in derogation of Congress's powers, and the Senate fell one vote short of removing Johnson, whose impeachment chiefly concerned an alleged violation of a law limiting dismissals.³⁶³⁸ In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton described impeachable offenses as abuses or violations of public trust.³⁹

Trump claimed a power to tax imports without limits on amount, duration or scope, under a law the Supreme Court held did not authorize tariffs.⁶ He exercised it: the trade court reported an estimated $166 billion in duties assessed.⁸ That is an abuse of Congress's taxing power with a concrete public cost, and it is why this case belongs on this site.⁶⁸⁹