Months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a sweeping set of Trump-era tariffs that exceeded presidential authority, the Trump administration is in a frantic race to roll out permanent replacement import levies before the temporary replacement measures expire this July. The timeline, accelerated to beat the midterm election cycle, has already sparked widespread criticism that the trade investigations paving the way for the new tariffs are a preordained political sham.
The saga began in February, when the nation’s highest court ruled that former President (now President) Donald Trump overstepped his executive power when he invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose double-digit tariffs on nearly all imported goods from around the world. The ruling marked a major rebuke of Trump’s long-held protectionist trade agenda, which had relied heavily on flexible, unilateral tariff power to pressure trading partners and generate revenue for the U.S. Treasury. To add to the administration’s challenge, the ruling requires the federal government to refund billions in tariff payments already collected from importers.
Within 48 hours of the Supreme Court decision, Trump rolled out temporary replacement tariffs under Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to impose global tariffs of up to 15% for a 150-day window. The current 10% temporary levies are set to expire on July 24, and congressional extension is widely seen as a political nonstarter. With November’s midterm elections approaching, lawmakers are reluctant to back a broad import tax that would likely push consumer prices even higher at a time when voters are already deeply frustrated by persistent high cost of living.
To solve this political and policy dilemma, the administration has turned to Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, a provision that authorizes the imposition of tariffs and other trade sanctions against nations found to engage in unfair, unjustifiable, or discriminatory trade practices. Unlike IEEPA, Section 301 has already survived judicial scrutiny: Trump used the same provision to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term, and those levies withstood multiple court challenges.
Starting this week, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) will launch back-to-back public hearings for two overlapping Section 301 investigations that cover more than 99% of all U.S. imports. The first hearing, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, will examine whether 60 global economies – ranging from Nigeria to Norway – do enough to block trade in goods produced by forced labor. USTR head Jamieson Greer argued in March that American workers and businesses have long been forced to compete against foreign producers that gain an unfair cost advantage from the “scourge of forced labor,” and the probe could result in punitive tariffs against non-compliant nations.
Next week, USTR will open a second hearing focused on whether 16 major U.S. trading partners – including China, the European Union, and Japan – are engaging in overproduction that suppresses global goods prices and puts domestic U.S. manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage. According to Erica York of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the economies named in this probe account for 70% of all U.S. imports. Notably, nearly all major economies targeted in the second probe are also included in the forced labor investigation, clearing multiple paths for the administration to impose new broad-based tariffs. Most major economies, including China, the EU and Japan, appear on both investigation lists.
While Greer has publicly insisted that the investigations will remain impartial and that he will not prejudge their outcomes, critics say the outcome is already predetermined. Before the probes even concluded, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed that the administration intends to replace lost original tariff revenue with new import levies collected under the Section 301 process. Trump himself has openly stated that the new tariffs will “get us more money.”
“If you believe the Treasury secretary and the president, then the cake is already baked,” explained Scott Lincicome, a trade policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “These investigations will result in tariffs that approximate what the Supreme Court overruled in February.”
Critics have also flagged the accelerated timeline of the investigations as evidence of a predetermined outcome. When Trump imposed Section 301 tariffs on China during his first term, the full investigation and public comment process took nearly a year. If the administration meets its goal of imposing new tariffs by the time the temporary Section 122 levies expire, the entire process will take less than six months – less than half the timeline of the 2010s China probe.
Kenya Davis, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who has done pro bono work on forced labor and human trafficking issues, called the accelerated timeline suspicious. “It’s such a short timeframe,” Davis said. “It’s so condensed that it doesn’t make a lot of sense that they can do it that quickly.” Importers have already decried the entire process as a transparent sham designed to lock in Trump’s protectionist agenda regardless of the actual findings of the investigations.
While any new Section 301 tariffs will almost certainly face fresh legal challenges from importers and affected nations, trade experts say the new tariffs are far more likely to survive judicial review than the earlier IEEPA levies. The provision itself has a long track record of surviving legal challenges, and the required public investigation process provides legal cover even if the ultimate goal is explicitly to replace the struck-down tariffs.
“Even if it is a veiled — or less-than-veiled — attempt to reinitiate the IEEPA tariffs, he still has the cover of the process itself,” said Joyce Adetutu, a trade lawyer and partner at Vinson & Elkins.
For businesses and consumers, the biggest shift from the earlier IEEPA regime is that Section 301 requires formal procedural steps that prevent the kind of erratic, unilateral policy changes that marked Trump’s first tariff regime. During his earlier use of IEEPA, Trump openly threatened to impose tariffs on Canada over a critical television ad, and regularly threatened abrupt tariff changes to pressure trading partners into accepting lopsided trade deals.
“One of the reasons Trump used IEEPA is because it was just a complete blank slate” — or seemed to be before the Supreme Court ruling, Cato’s Lincicome said. He described the old authority as “a little tariff switch in the Oval Office that Trump could flip on and off anytime he wants; he wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t like a Canadian television commercial, he flips the switch … You really can’t do that with 301.”
That said, the new tariffs will still carry significant cost for American households: tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, and almost always passed through to consumers in the form of higher prices, adding additional strain to household budgets already stretched by persistent inflation.