The United States Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the president Donald Trump exceeded his authority by imposing a series of tariffs that disrupted the world trade.
That sentence blocks a key tool that the president had used to impose his economic and diplomatic agenda.
The highest court, with a conservative majority, decided by six votes to three that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 “does not authorize the president to impose tariffs“.
This decision refers to the customs duties presented as “reciprocal” by Donald Trumpbut not to those applied to specific sectors such as automobiles, steel or aluminum.
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Trump already started using tariffs during his first term (2017-2021) as a lever of pressure and negotiation, but upon returning to power in January 2025 he immediately announced that he was going to use the IEEPA to impose new taxes on practically all of the United States’ trading partners.
In addition to tariffs for commercial reasons, Trump enacted special customs tariffs on important partners such as Mexico, Canada and China due to drug trafficking and immigration.
Trump also used the IEEPA to pressure countries at war, and boasted of having managed to resolve eight long-standing international conflicts in 2025, for example between Thailand and Cambodia, thanks to the threat of tariffs.
But the high court recalled this Friday that “if Congress had intended to grant the distinct and extraordinary power to impose tariffs” through the IEEPA, “it would have done so expressly, as it has done systematically in other tariff statutes.”
Supreme Court decision confirms Previous lower court rulings that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were illegal.
A lower commercial court had ruled in May that Trump overstepped his authority with widespread levies and blocked most of them from taking effect, but that outcome had been put on hold pending the government’s appeal.
Three conservative justices, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from the majority.
A ‘mess’
Repealing these tariffs will likely reduce the average tariff rate from 16.8% to around 9.5%, Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told AFP before the ruling.
But this could prove temporary as the government looks for other avenues to reimpose extensive customs duties, he added.
Trump has suggested he has other ways to impose tariffs.but they will be longer and more bureaucratic.
The Executive can, for example, impose tariffs for a limited period of time, which requires them to be renewed periodically.
In any case, the ruling leaves in the air the enormous tariff revenues that the government achieved last year.
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Daco calculates that between 100,000 and 120,000 million dollars are at stake.
The judges did not address the extent to which importers who had sued the Trump administration can receive refunds.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh warned that This process could cause a “mess”.
Trump had promised to even study a distribution of part of those tariff revenues among Americans.
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