President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed import tariffs ranging from 10% to 12.5% on 60 trading partners, utilizing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The levies target countries the U.S. claims fail to enforce forced-labor bans, drawing immediate domestic and international legal challenges.
Section 301 Tariffs Replace Lapsed Duties and Spark Immediate Lawsuits
President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countries, utilizing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes against nations found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices, according to Apnews. The new levies, ranging from 10% to 12.5%, took effect on Friday, replacing temporary 10% worldwide tariffs that had just expired (as detailed by CNN). Those expired duties were themselves a stopgap replacement for universal tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down in February.
The administration levied the new duties under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, arguing that the affected trading partners—which account for 99% of U.S. imports—either do not have or do not effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. Yet the rollout triggered an instant courtroom showdown. Just hours after the tariffs took effect, two small businesses represented by the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade. The legal challenge argues that the administration is using forced-labor enforcement merely as a pretext to resurrect the broad global tariff regime that the Supreme Court torpedoed earlier in the year.
Trade Experts and Foreign Governments Reject the Forced-Labor Justification
Peter Harrell, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of International Economic Law, told CNBC that Trump is using the statute in a fundamentally different way
than ever intended. Section 301 was never intended for the president to just wholesale rewrite the tariff schedule,
Harrell said, adding that the latest maneuver could for sure
be struck down in court.
Independent analysts also pointed to a glaring lack of supporting documentation. Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, noted that while investigating whether a country maintains a formal ban is straightforward, verifying exact enforcement failures across 60 distinct economies is another matter entirely. There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,
Lincicome said in Apnews. It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.
Targeted nations pushed back forcefully against the designations.
Economic Pressures and Consumer Costs Loom as Investigations Expand
Although the new levies mirror the expired rates and feature specific carve-outs, the current average tariff rate sits at 11%, according to projections from the Budget Lab at Yale University (reported by NPR).
Meanwhile, the administration shows no signs of slowing its trade agenda. Trump declared that the U.S. will immediately initiate a separate Section 301 investigation into the European Union in retaliation for heavy antitrust fines levied against American technology firms (noted by CNN).
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