When a president can unilaterally reprice nearly every imported good in the United States with a stroke of the pen, the line between emergency management and ordinary governance begins to disappear. In a political atmosphere that is growing increasingly polarized and discordant, can the authority of the executive branch be stretched to encompass the broad powers of taxation endowed to Congress?
In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (2025), the Supreme Court confronts whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—a statute enacted to cabin Cold War–era emergency sanctions—now permits the president to wield what is functionally a general taxing and trade power in response to self‑defined “national emergencies.” At stake is not only the validity of President Trump’s 2025 “trafficking” and “reciprocal” tariffs, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in projected federal revenue, but the power of checks and balances whenever the executive invokes economic emergency.
This article argues that IEEPA cannot constitutionally be read to authorize the president to impose broad, revenue‑raising tariff regimes of the sort at issue in Learning Resources, and that courts should adopt a limiting construction of both IEEPA’s delegation and “emergency” triggers to preserve the integrity of the Constitution’s allocation of taxing and commerce powers. First, I will demonstrate that the text, structure, and history of IEEPA—especially its relationship to the Trading with the Enemy Act and the National Emergencies Act—express that Congress delegated a narrow sanctions tool, not an open‑ended authority to rewrite tariff schedules. Second, I will show that even if IEEPA’s language could be stretched to reach tariffs, using it to effect sweeping, peacetime trade policy violates modern nondelegation principles by allowing the president to exercise core Article I powers under an indeterminate “unusual and extraordinary threat” standard. Third, I will argue the Court should articulate a doctrinal framework for policing the conceptual boundaries of “emergency” economic powers: emergency statutes must be interpreted to require genuine, exogenous crises and to exclude longstanding macroeconomic conditions, such as persistent trade deficits, from serving as emergency predicates.
Properly constrained, IEEPA can continue to function as a vital tool for targeted sanctions and crisis management without collapsing the constitutional distinction between executive implementation and legislative policymaking. Learning Resources thus offers the Court a rare opportunity to restate the law of emergency economic powers by clarifying how far Congress may delegate crisis authorities, what counts as an “emergency” in the economic realm, and how courts should scrutinize executive claims of necessity when those claims threaten to convert emergency law into a standing alternative to ordinary lawmaking.
Questions Presented:
The cases of Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated by The Supreme Court on September 9, 2025, present two fundamental questions.[1]
- Does IEEPA’s authorization to “regulate … importation” encompass the authority to impose tariffs—monetary exactions that function as taxes on imported goods?
- If the statute does grant such authority, does this delegation violate the nondelegation doctrine by permitting the president to exercise the power to lay and collect taxes?[2]
These questions implicate not only the validity of specific tariff orders, but the proper allocation of power among the three branches of government and the constitutional limits on congressional delegation of its core legislative functions.
Background: the 2025 Tariff Actions
The President’s Invocation of IEEPA
In February 2025, the Trump administration showed an unprecedented exercise of executive authority by invoking IEEPA to impose comprehensive tariff regimes affecting nearly all U.S. trading partners. President Trump’s deployment of IEEPA authority proceeded in two distinct phases, each predicated on separate emergency declarations that tested the outer boundaries of the statute’s language. In February 2025, the administration issued “trafficking tariffs,” imposing duties on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China tied to a declared national emergency concerning fentanyl and illicit drug trafficking across U.S. borders.[3] The administration characterized these tariffs as necessary pressure mechanisms to compel the named countries into enhanced cooperation on interdiction and enforcement efforts. The emergency declaration asserted that the flow of fentanyl and other narcotics across American borders constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, justifying the exercise of IEEPA’s emergency powers.[4]
Shortly after, the President issued a second, far more expansive set of “reciprocal tariffs” covering most imports from nearly all U.S. trading partners.[5] The accompanying emergency declaration broke new ground by asserting that persistent U.S. trade deficits—a feature of the American economy for nearly five decades—constitute an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security and the American economy.[6] The reciprocal tariff structure ostensibly aimed to mirror the tariff rates other nations impose on U.S. exports, thereby creating symmetry in trade relationships and reducing what the administration characterized as systematic disadvantages facing American producers. The president’s proclamations imposed varying tariff rates on different countries, ranging from modest percentages to rates exceeding 25 percent, with the stated objective of incentivizing foreign governments to lower their own trade barriers.[7]
The scope and magnitude of these tariff actions distinguished them markedly from prior IEEPA invocations. Whereas previous uses of the statute had imposed targeted sanctions on specific foreign actors, frozen particular assets, or blocked specific transactions with hostile regimes, the Trump tariffs functioned as comprehensive revenue-raising measures affecting the cost of goods for American consumers and businesses across virtually all sectors of the economy.[8] Economic analyses submitted during litigation estimated the tariffs would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal revenue annually while substantially increasing costs for importers and, ultimately, domestic purchasers.[9] The breadth of the action—touching nearly every aspect of international commerce—raised immediate questions about whether IEEPA, enacted as an emergency sanctions statute, could reasonably be interpreted to authorize what appears to be a fundamental restructuring of American trade policy through unilateral executive action.
I. From Sanctions Tool to Shadow Tariff Code
Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977 as part of a broader reform effort to constrain presidential emergency powers that had expanded dramatically during the Cold War era.[10] The statute authorizes the president to take specified actions “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”[11] The procedural requirements for invoking these powers are established by the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which mandates that the president submit annual declarations to sustain IEEPA actions beyond one year and provides Congress with the authority to terminate a declared emergency through joint resolution.[12]
The operative grant of authority appears in 50 U.S.C.A. § 1702, a statute which empowers the president to “regulate … importation or exportation” through “instructions, licenses, or otherwise.”[13] Notably absent from the statute’s text are the words “tariff,” “duty,” or “tax,” an omission central to the ongoing litigation in Learning Resources. The statute does, however, enumerate a series of specific actions the president may take, including the power to “investigate, block … direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent, or prohibit” certain transactions.[14]
From looking at the legislation’s history, IEEPA’s statutory predecessor, the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), contained nearly identical language authorizing presidential regulation of importation.[15] Originally enacted as a wartime measure, TWEA was repeatedly invoked during peacetime throughout the mid-twentieth century, prompting the 1977 reforms that created IEEPA as a distinct peacetime emergency statute while preserving TWEA exclusively for wartime use.[16] The legislative history reveals Congress’s intent to cabin executive emergency authority within defined procedural and substantive limits, responding to concerns about unchecked presidential power that had emerged during the Nixon era.[17]
Since its enactment, presidents have deployed IEEPA primarily to impose targeted sanctions against foreign governments, entities, and individuals based on national security concerns.[18] The statute formed the legal foundation for the Iranian asset freeze during the 1979 hostage crisis—an action the Supreme Court upheld in Dames & Moore v. Regan[19]—and has subsequently been invoked to sanction regimes in Libya, Iraq, North Korea, and numerous other contexts. Yet in nearly five decades, no president prior to Trump had invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs as a general revenue measure or trade policy tool.
Read against this backdrop, the 2025 “trafficking” and “reciprocal” tariffs mark a qualitative break with IEEPA’s historical function. Rather than freezing particular assets or prohibiting discrete transactions with hostile actors, the challenged orders establish an alternative, presidentially controlled tariff structure that governs most imported goods and raises general revenue on a scale comparable to major tax legislation. Treating such a regime as an ordinary exercise of delegated emergency authority would collapse the constitutional distinction between targeted sanctions and wholesale trade policymaking, written in the Constitution that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises…” and “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations…” effectively transforming IEEPA into a shadow tariff code that can be invoked whenever the president proclaims an “unusual and extraordinary” economic condition.[20]
II. The Competing Legal Arguments
The consolidated challenges in Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump crystallize two sharply divergent accounts of what IEEPA authorizes and how far Congress may delegate emergency economic authority to the president. On one side, the government defends the trafficking and reciprocal tariffs as a lawful, if assertive, use of a broad statutory grant to “regulate… importation” in response to “unusual and extraordinary” external threats. On the other hand, small businesses, states, and trade associations contend that the challenged orders exceed IEEPA’s textual bounds, distort its historical function as a sanctions statute, and effect an unconstitutional transfer of core legislative powers over taxation and foreign commerce to the executive.[21]
1. The Government’s Position
The government’s defense rests on three pillars. First, it adopts a capacious reading of IEEPA’s operative language. Section 1702 empowers the president to “regulate … importation” through “instructions, licenses, or otherwise.” In the government’s view, tariffs are a modality of regulating importation: by adjusting the price of foreign goods at the border, the executive shapes import volumes and composition within the ordinary meaning of “regulate.” The absence of “tariff,” “duty,” or “tax” reflects Congress’s decision to legislate at a high level of generality, not an implied prohibition on price‑based tools addressing external threats.
Second, the government emphasizes the emergency predicates in the 2025 proclamations. The trafficking tariffs respond to a declared national emergency concerning fentanyl as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” with its source in substantial part outside the United States. The reciprocal tariffs address persistent trade deficits and unfair foreign trade practices threatening the American economy and national security. By tying each regime to formally declared emergencies satisfying IEEPA’s textual triggers, the government argues it has complied with both the statute and the National Emergencies Act’s procedural requirements.
Third, the government maintains that IEEPA easily satisfies nondelegation doctrine. Congress supplied an intelligible principle—responding to “unusual and extraordinary threats” to national security, foreign policy, or the economy arising substantially abroad—and layered on procedural safeguards through the National Emergencies Act’s reporting and termination mechanisms. The challenged orders represent a policy choice within the range of discretion Congress has long afforded presidents in foreign affairs, akin to prior uses of IEEPA for targeted sanctions. A narrow reading, the government warns, would hamstring the executive’s ability to respond to fast‑moving international crises by drawing artificial distinctions between economic tools that operate on a continuum.
2. The Plaintiffs’ Position
The plaintiffs offer a starkly different account. They begin with text and structure: IEEPA authorizes the president to “regulate… importation” but conspicuously omits any reference to “tariffs,” “duties,” or “taxes,” even though Congress has elsewhere enacted a dense and highly reticulated body of tariff statutes specifying duty rates, schedules, and procedures through ordinary Article I legislation. In the plaintiffs’ view, this silence is especially telling given that tariffs have historically been treated as quintessential exercises of the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” expressly vested in Congress.[22] Reading IEEPA to authorize the president to impose comprehensive revenue‑raising tariffs would therefore infer a delegation of core taxing authority from a statute that never mentions taxation and was enacted for a very different purpose.
Plaintiffs also situate IEEPA within its historical context as a post‑TWEA reform designed to constrain, rather than expand, peacetime emergency powers. The 1977 reforms responded to concerns that presidents had used the Trading with the Enemy Act as an omnipotent source of economic authority in nonwar emergencies, prompting Congress to separate wartime and peacetime powers and to impose procedural and substantive limits. Against that backdrop, they argue, it is implausible to attribute to the 95th Congress an intent to authorize presidents to unilaterally restructure the nation’s tariff code and raise hundreds of billions of dollars in general revenue based solely on self‑declared economic emergencies. The challenged tariffs thus represent not a faithful application of IEEPA’s sanctions regime, but a fundamental repurposing of the statute into a vehicle for ordinary trade and tax policy.
On the constitutional front, plaintiffs contend that even if IEEPA’s text could be stretched to cover tariffs, using it to implement the trafficking and reciprocal tariff regimes violates the nondelegation doctrine. In their view, allowing the president to define “unusual and extraordinary” economic threats and then to select any border‑based financial instrument—including broad, nondiscretionary tariffs that generate massive revenue and reshape trade patterns—effectively transfers to the executive the legislative power over taxation and foreign commerce. The intelligible principle, they argue, is too open‑ended in the economic context, especially when coupled with the political reality that Congress rarely terminates declared emergencies under the National Emergencies Act. The result is a de facto, indefinite delegation of a core Article I function under the thin veneer of emergency rhetoric.
Finally, plaintiffs stress practical harms. The tariffs operate as a nationwide tax on imports, raising consumer prices and disrupting supply chains in ways that fall heavily on small businesses and state economies that had no voice in their adoption. By bypassing Congress and using IEEPA to implement what amounts to a new tariff code, the executive undermines democratic accountability and deprives states and representatives of the ordinary legislative process through which such sweeping economic measures are typically debated and refined.
II. The Conceptual Problem: Defining “Emergency”
The parties’ competing readings expose a deeper problem: neither offers a clear measure of when an “emergency” is sufficiently extraordinary to justify reallocating control over taxing and trade policy to the executive. Without such a limiting principle, the combination of IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act risks converting long‑term policy disagreements into perpetual emergencies licensing unilateral presidential lawmaking.
The core constitutional danger lies not only in IEEPA’s breadth but in the elasticity of “unusual and extraordinary threat” as a trigger. If persistent trade deficits—an entrenched feature of the economy for decades—qualify as an “unusual and extraordinary” threat, virtually any disfavored macroeconomic condition could be recharacterized as an emergency justifying unilateral tariff policy. This conceptual stretching matters because it erodes the temporal and substantive limits that justify emergency powers in constitutional democracies. Emergency regimes are tolerated on the premise that they respond to exigent, unforeseen disruptions that ordinary legislative processes cannot address quickly enough. When the same framework addresses long‑standing, predictable economic trends, “emergency” becomes a rhetorical device allowing the executive to bypass institutional checks that normally accompany taxation and trade policy.
The danger is compounded by the interaction between IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act. Although the Act requires periodic reporting and permits Congress to terminate emergencies by joint resolution, political incentives and procedural hurdles make congressional termination rare in practice. Once declared, emergencies tend to persist for years or decades, gradually normalizing extraordinary delegations as part of the baseline legal order. In the tariff context, what begins as an “emergency” response to trade deficits can harden into a semi‑permanent presidential tariff code operating independently of Congress’s ordinary Article I processes for laying and collecting duties, effecting a quiet but profound reallocation of economic governance.
III. Reconstructing the Conceptual Limits of Economic Emergency
This article proposes a three‑part limiting principle for economic emergencies under IEEPA. First, the precipitating condition must involve a sudden or acute disruption, rather than a longstanding or cyclical economic pattern. Second, the threat must stem from exogenous conduct or events “outside the United States,” consistent with IEEPA’s text, rather than from general domestic policy choices or structural economic trends. Third, the remedy must be narrowly tailored to the discrete threat, rather than amounting to a comprehensive restructuring of trade or tax policy. Applied here, that framework would permit targeted sanctions aimed at specific fentanyl supply chains but would exclude the reciprocal tariffs premised on decades‑old trade imbalances.
Reframing IEEPA’s “emergency” requirement in this way also provides a vehicle for revitalizing nondelegation in a targeted, context‑specific manner. Instead of invalidating IEEPA outright, courts can insist that broad delegations of emergency economic authority be interpreted to authorize only crisis‑specific, temporary interventions, not durable substitutes for ordinary tax and trade legislation.
IV. Conclusion
Learning Resources presents the Supreme Court with a rare opportunity to restate the law of emergency economic powers. By clarifying how far Congress may delegate crisis authorities, what counts as an “emergency” in the economic realm, and how courts should scrutinize executive claims of necessity, the Court can prevent emergency law from becoming a standing alternative to ordinary lawmaking. The constitutional distinction between executive implementation and legislative policymaking—and the separation of powers it protects—depends on maintaining coherent conceptual boundaries around “emergency powers” before those powers swallow the norm.
[1] Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., No. 25-250, 2025 WL 2601020 (U.S. Sept. 9, 2025) (mem.).
[2] U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1.
[3] Exec. Order. No. 14194, 90 Fed. Reg. 9117 (Feb. 1, 2025) (Imposing Duties To Address the Situation at Our Southern Border); Exec. Order. No. 14193, 90 Fed. Reg. 9113 (Feb. 1, 2025) (Imposing Duties To Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border); Exec. Order. No. 14195, 90 Fed. Reg. 9121 (Feb. 1, 2025) (Imposing Duties To Address the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China).
[4] Id.
[5] Exec. Order. No. 14257, 90 Fed. Reg. 15041 (Apr. 2, 2025) (Regulating Imports With a Reciprocal Tariff To Rectify Trade Practices That Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits)
[6] Brief of Economists as Amici Curiae at 12, Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, No. 25-250 (U.S. 2025).
[7] Exec. Order. No. 14257, supra note 4.
[8] Brief for Private Respondents at 8-10, Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, No. 25-250 (U.S. 2025).
[9] Brief of Economists as Amici Curiae, supra note 5, at 15-18.
[10] Harold Hongju Koh, The 21st Century National Security Constitution, 91 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1391, 1395 (2023).
[11] 50 U.S.C.A. § 1701(a)(West).
[12] 50 U.S.C.A. §§ 1601-1651 (West).
[13] 50 U.S.C.A. § 1702(a)(1)(A) (West).
[14] Id. § 1702(a)(1)(B).
[15] Trading with the Enemy Act, 50 U.S.C. § 4305(b) (West)
[16] See S. Rep. No. 95-466, at 3-5 (1977).
[17] Id.
[18] See generally Peter E. Harrell, The Limits of Ieepa, 48 Fordham Int’l L.J. 1043 (2025)
[19] Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654, 101 S. Ct. 2972, 69 L. Ed. 2d 918 (1981)
[20] U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1, 3.; see U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.
[21] Response Brief for Petitioner, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287 (U.S. Oct. 20, 2025).
[22] U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 1.