Tariffs at the Breaking Point

Businesses are facing something more destabilizing than higher costs — uncertainty.

Barely a year into his return to the White House, Donald Trump has remade the foundations of American trade. Nearly half of all goods entering the United States now face a tariff — levels not seen since the 1930s — and the Supreme Court is about to decide whether one of the president’s most powerful tools for imposing them is even legal.

Trump has relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1970s law meant for financial and national security crises, to levy tariffs on more than $300 billion in imports — covering 29% of everything America buys from abroad. The law never mentions tariffs. If the Court strikes it down, it would remove the legal basis for nearly a third of Trump’s trade war.