Are Trump's Tariffs Responding to an Actual Emergency?

On Thursday morning, attorneys representing the administration stood before a panel of federal judges in Washington, D.C., to defend the President Donald Trump’s use of emergency economic powers to levy tariffs.

By Thursday evening, however, a new executive order seemed to undermine the legal basis for those tariffs. With the enforcement of some tariffs postponed until early October, it’s becoming ever more difficult to believe that the president is responding to “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”

That’s the key phrase in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 statute that Trump has invoked to apply tariffs on imports from Canada, China, Mexico, and now dozens of other countries. It is also at the crux of the lawsuit currently sitting before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In oral arguments on Thursday, Trump’s attorneys argued that America’s trade deficit constituted exactly such a threat, and that the law ought to allow Trump to take action. (Never mind that—as an economic matter rather than a legal one—trade deficits aren’t emergencies and tariffs are unlikely to reduce them.)

But if the administration seriously thinks this is an emergency, why is it responding so slowly?

Under the terms of an executive order published Thursday night, the Trump administration is postponing the enforcement of some tariffs until early October. Specifically, goods that are “withdrawn from a warehouse for consumption” by October 5 will not be subject to tariffs, even if they are imported after the August 7 deadline when the new tariffs are set to take effect.

Cynically, that provision might be seen as a way to avoid hiking prices in advance of the holiday season—since most stores will have stocked up on those items by early October. It also creates a bit more leeway for tariff advocates to keep claiming that the president’s policies aren’t raising prices, as the impact from tariffs will be blunted for the next few months.

It also creates an amusing bit of arbitrary government policy. Goods removed from a warehouse on October 4 are apparently the result of consensual and normal market processes, but goods removed from warehouses on October 6 represent a dire national security risk that requires expansive emergency powers to combat. That’s just silly.

More important, given the context of the legal challenges facing Trump’s tariffs, is what this maneuver says about the supposed emergency that the president is responding to. By October, six months will have passed since Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement and the invoking of IEEPA to impose broad tariffs on nearly all imports. In what other situation would anyone wait six months to respond to an emergency? Imagine if that’s how the fire department treated a crisis.

If an emergency exists, then there is no justification for further delays. But if, as seems obvious, Trump is merely using the claim of an emergency to accomplish routine policy goals, then the courts (and Congress) should move to block the tariffs.

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