AP
Washington
President Donald Trump is scrambling to replace the revenue the federal government lost when the Supreme Court struck down his biggest and boldest tariffs last month.
If the effort succeeds, congressional Democrats warn in a study out Friday, the administration’s import taxes will cost American households an average of $2,512 in 2026, up 44% from $1,745 in tariff costs last year. And this at a time when US consumers are already angry over the high cost of living and the war with Iran is pushing up energy prices.
“Despite a Supreme Court ruling that much of Trump’s tariff agenda is illegal, the Trump administration refuses to provide relief for families,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee. “As American families continue to struggle with high costs, the President keeps choosing to institute new tariffs that will push prices even higher.”
Calling the study “phony,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said “President Trump will continue using tariffs to renegotiate broken trade deals, lower drug prices, and secure trillions in investments for the American people.” Trump last year invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose double-digit tariffs.
But the Supreme Court ruled Feb. 20 that the law did not give the president the authority to levy tariffs. The government now must provide refunds – expected to come to around $175 billion – to the importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs now declared illegal.
The administration has moved quickly to impose new tariffs, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that that new levies “will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.
Trump has already announced a 10% tariff, invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and may raise it to 15%. But those levies can only last 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend them. And the Section 122 tariffs are also being challenged in court.
A sturdier option is Section 301 of the same 1974 trade law, which authorizes the president to impose tariffs and other sanctions on countries engaged in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices. Trump, accusing China of using unfair tactics to gain an advantage in high tech industries, used Section 301 to impose tariffs on Chinese imports in his first term, and they withstood legal challenges.
On Wednesday, US trade representative Jamieson Greer, announced a sweeping Section 301 investigation into whether 16 US trading partners, including China and the European Union, are overproducing goods, flooding the world with their products and hurting American manufacturers.
“The United States will no longer sacrifice its industrial base to other countries that may be exporting their problems with excess capacity and production to us,” Greer said in a statement. The probe is widely expected to end in a new round of hefty tariffs.
“The fact that they launched 301 investigations is not surprising,” said trade lawyer Ryan Majerus, a partner at King & Spalding and a former US trade official. “We all knew that’s what they were going to pivot to. The challenge is that this is way more sprawling than anyone expected.’’ That is because so many countries were targeted and because the inquiry – whether countries have excess industrial capacity and are overproducing goods – “can be framed pretty broadly.’’
The administration is rolling out another Section 301 investigation into banning imported goods made by forced labor. Greer told reporters Wednesday that additional Section 301 investigations could cover issues such as digital services taxes, pharmaceutical drug pricing and ocean pollution.
The administration is also expected to make more use of Section 232 of Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs on goods deemed to be threats to national security after an investigation by the Commerce Department. The US already has Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and auto parts and other products.
The report from Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee finds that the new tariffs will increase the burden on American households this year. That is partly because the tariff revenue would be collected for the full year; Trump needed time to impose tariffs in 2025 and occasionally suspended them.
The Democrats also assume that American households will absorb 100% of the tariff cost. They cite a Congressional Budget Office report concluding that importers can pass along 70% of the tariff costs to consumers. But the tariffs also allow domestic producers to raise prices – because of less competition from imports and increased demand for their tariff-free products. Combined, passed-along costs from importers and higher prices from domestic companies effectively mean that consumers end up footing the entire US Tariff bill, according to CBO.
