type: timeline_event
On March 11, 2026, the Trump administration announced new trade investigations targeting China, Mexico, the European Union, and more than a dozen other economies under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, explicitly designed to reconstruct the tariff architecture that the Supreme Court had struck down on February 20.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not authorize the president to impose tariffs, holding that if Congress had intended to delegate its constitutional taxing power, it would have done so explicitly. The ruling required U.S. Customs and Border Protection to begin refunding approximately $166 billion in illegally collected tariffs from more than 330,000 importers who had made over 53 million entries. The Court of International Trade had already ordered on March 4 that refunds apply to all importers, not just those who had filed suit — but CBP told the court on March 6 it could not comply for approximately 45 days due to systems limitations.
The administration's response was to immediately pivot to Section 301 investigations, which allow tariffs to be imposed on countries found to engage in unfair trade practices — a statutory hook potentially more durable than IEEPA. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicted that by August, tariff rates would "effectively return to where they stood before the Supreme Court" ruling.
The episode illustrated a recurring pattern of the Trump administration: when courts blocked one mechanism of executive unilateralism, the administration immediately searched for an alternative route to the same destination rather than accepting the constitutional limits the judiciary had identified. Bessent's public prediction of returning to pre-ruling tariff levels within five months signaled that the administration viewed the Supreme Court's ruling not as a legal constraint to be respected but as an obstacle to be routed around.