A federal trade court on Thursday struck down President Trump's 10 percent global tariff, ruling that the administration lacked legal authority to impose the levy under the trade statute it cited, the second time this year a court has dismantled a major piece of the president's trade agenda.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade voted 2-1 to impose a permanent injunction on the tariff, which Trump placed on nearly all U.S. imports in February. Judges Mark A. Barnett and Claire R. Kelly formed the majority. Judge Timothy C. Stanceu dissented.
The ruling lands just months after the Supreme Court struck down the administration's broader "Liberation Day" tariffs on goods from dozens of trading partners. Trump had turned to a different legal authority, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, to reimpose a baseline 10 percent levy. Now that fallback has collapsed, too, leaving the administration searching for yet another path to enforce its trade vision through executive action.
The majority opinion turned on a narrow but consequential question: whether the president had met the legal requirements of Section 122 before invoking it. That provision gives the president power to impose tariffs to address balance-of-payments deficits with trading partners. The administration argued that high U.S. trade deficits and the outflow of American dollars to foreign nations cleared that bar.
The court disagreed. As The Hill reported, the majority wrote:
"This case turns on the meaning of Section 122 and whether the President asserted the existence of the conditions required by the statute in order to lawfully proclaim the import surcharges.... As discussed further below, the President's Proclamation fails to assert that those required conditions have been satisfied."
In plainer terms, the court found that Trump's proclamation never identified an actual balance-of-payments deficit, the specific economic condition Section 122 was designed to address. A general trade deficit, the majority held, is not the same thing.
The Washington Times reported the court declared the levies "invalid, and the tariffs imposed on plaintiffs are unauthorized by law." That language leaves little room for ambiguity about the scope of the injunction.
Judge Stanceu's dissent was noted in the ruling, though the full reasoning behind his disagreement has not been detailed in available reporting.
Thursday's decision cannot be understood without the Supreme Court ruling that preceded it. Earlier this year, the Court voted 6-3 to strike down Trump's sweeping tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The justices held that IEEPA, a 1977 emergency statute, does not authorize a president to levy tariffs of "unlimited amount, duration, and scope," as Newsmax reported.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, a coalition that crossed the Court's usual ideological lines. As the New York Post reported, Roberts wrote that the president must "point to clear congressional authorization" to justify the power to impose tariffs, adding bluntly: "He cannot."
That decision invalidated the 10 percent baseline tariffs along with additional levies on imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and other nations. It also raised the prospect of tens of billions of dollars in refunds to companies that had already paid the struck-down duties, a financial consequence that a subsequent federal judge's order made concrete.
Trump called the Supreme Court ruling "deeply disappointing" and said he was "ashamed of certain members of the Court... for not having the courage to do what's right for the country." The administration then pivoted to Section 122 as an alternative legal foundation.
That pivot is now the subject of Thursday's injunction.
The back-to-back losses highlight a structural problem for the administration's trade strategy: it has relied on executive authority to impose tariffs without congressional legislation, and the courts have repeatedly found those claims of authority lacking. The Supreme Court's IEEPA ruling rested on the major questions doctrine, the principle that agencies and presidents need clear congressional authorization before taking actions of vast economic and political significance.
Vice President Vance called the Supreme Court's February tariff ruling "lawlessness" and framed the administration's shift to alternative trade authorities as a legitimate response. But the Court of International Trade has now closed the Section 122 door as well, at least at the trial level.
Not all tariffs have been affected. The National Review noted that tariffs on steel and aluminum imposed under different statutes remain in place. The legal fight is specifically over the broad, global levies that the administration tried to impose first through IEEPA and then through Section 122.
The distinction matters. Steel and aluminum tariffs have narrower statutory footing and have survived legal scrutiny. The global tariffs, designed to apply across the board to nearly every import, require a much broader claim of presidential power, and that claim has now failed twice.
The administration will almost certainly appeal Thursday's ruling. The Court of International Trade is a specialized federal court, and its decisions can be reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and ultimately by the Supreme Court. Whether the administration can secure a stay of the permanent injunction while it appeals remains an open question.
There is also the question of congressional action. The Supreme Court's IEEPA ruling and now the CIT's Section 122 ruling both rest on the same basic principle: Congress holds the constitutional power to impose tariffs, and the president needs clear statutory authorization to exercise that power on Congress's behalf. If the administration wants broad tariff authority, the most durable path runs through Capitol Hill, not through executive proclamations and emergency statutes.
That path, of course, requires Republican leadership to build a legislative coalition and defend the policy on its merits. It is harder than signing a proclamation. It is also more constitutionally sound, and more likely to survive judicial review.
Trump's willingness to engage the Supreme Court directly, he became the first sitting president to attend oral arguments earlier this year, signals that the administration takes these legal battles seriously. But seriousness of engagement is not the same as winning.
Rep. Brendan Boyle seized on Thursday's ruling, saying: "Once again, a federal court has confirmed what we already knew: Trump's tariffs are an illegal tax on hardworking Americans." That framing is predictable from the opposition, but the underlying legal reality is harder to dismiss. Two different courts, applying two different statutes, have reached the same conclusion: the executive branch overstepped.
The administration's February pivot to Section 122 was always a gamble. The statute was designed for a specific and relatively rare economic condition, a balance-of-payments crisis, not as a general-purpose tariff tool. Stretching it to cover ordinary trade deficits invited exactly the kind of challenge the CIT majority delivered.
Conservatives who support robust trade enforcement should not be satisfied with executive shortcuts that crumble in court. Every injunction, every reversal, every refund order weakens the credibility of the trade agenda and hands opponents a talking point. Worse, it creates legal precedent that constrains future presidents, including conservative ones, from acting decisively when genuine emergencies arise.
The right answer is not to abandon tariffs. It is to ground them in statute, defend them in Congress, and build them on legal foundations that courts cannot dismantle with a single opinion. The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate foreign commerce. If Congress wants the president to have broad tariff authority, it can pass a law that says so clearly.
Two courts have now told this administration the same thing. The question is whether anyone in the White House is listening, or whether the next appeal will simply set up the next loss.