By Kailea Weitz
ASU Law Fellow
In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court held in the combined cases Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the President to impose import duties, invalidating President Trump’s 2025 “fentanyl” and “reciprocal” tariffs. Those measures previously included a 25% duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports, a 10% duty on most Chinese imports, and baseline 10% duties on imports from all trading partners, with higher rates on dozens of countries. The tariffs were repeatedly increased, decreased, and otherwise arbitrarily modified by Trump, allegedly justified to punish states for drug trafficking and persistent trade deficits.
Before the Court, the Trump Administration argued IEEPA’s power to “regulate … importation” included tariffs because tariffs have long been used to regulate imports. The government’s merits brief contended that the phrase encompasses duties and that IEEPA continued to provide independent authority for nearly unfettered presidential discretion, despite Congress’s enactment of more specific tariff statutes, including Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The government brief also pointed to IEEPA’s legislative history as emerging from the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), which authorized presidential regulation of foreign goods during wartime, and argued that IEEPA extended similar authority into presidentially declared national emergencies during peacetime. On that view, the President could deploy tariffs as an “emergency” response tool without being confined to the narrower conditions and limits of other tariff laws.
The Court rejected each argument before it. It held that IEEPA does not generally authorize the President to impose tariffs. The Court emphasized that Article I gives Congress, not the President, the power to lay duties and that no President had ever invoked IEEPA to impose any import duties despite regularly invoking IEEPA for other purposes and invoking other statutes to impose tariffs. It reasoned that if Congress had intended to delegate the “distinct and extraordinary power” to impose tariffs, it would have done so expressly, as it has in other tariff statutes. The Court noted that the Trump Administration’s position would empower the President to impose duties on “imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time” from “two words separated by 16 others” in IEEPA: “regulate” and “importation”.
While the ruling therefore narrowed one asserted source of presidential tariff authority, broader statutory tariff framework remains undisturbed. The Court itself pointed to other laws expressly delegating tariff powers, including Sections 122, 201, and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Thus, the decision is best conceptualized as a separation-of-powers holding: it foreclosed an overbroad reading of a general emergency statute without touching tariff tools Congress clearly delegated.
