Supreme Court Leaves Trump’s Steel Import Tariffs Intact
The Supreme Court decided on March 27 not to take up an industry challenge to steel import tariffs that then-President Donald Trump launched in 2018 on U.S. national security grounds.
President Joe Biden has left the tariffs, which Trump said were needed to assure robust levels of domestic steel production, largely intact. The Biden administration had urged the court to reject the challenge.
The tariffs were unveiled March 1, 2018. A 25 percent tariff on imported steel from most countries was imposed, along with a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum.
The next day Trump wrote on Twitter that trade wars were “good” and “easy to win.”
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump wrote at the time.
“Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore—we win big. It’s easy!” he wrote.
Trump cited Section 232 of the Trade Act of 1962, which permits the president to impose restrictions on the importation of goods deemed essential to national security. He said at the time that the tariffs were needed to bolster production of airplanes, ships, and military materials with U.S. steel. The tariffs created tension with some U.S. allies, although some countries were exempted from the policy.
The Supreme Court turned away the petition in USP Holdings Inc. v. United States, court file 22-565, in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented from the order.
Then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross commenced an investigation in April 2017 to determine if “steel was being imported under such circumstances as to threaten or impair national security,” according to the petition (pdf) filed with the Supreme Court.
Ross found in a 2018 report that “domestic steel production is important for national security applications,” and that steel imports were on track to comprise more than 30 percent of domestic consumption. He also determined that “excessive quantities of imports has the effect of weakening the internal economy of the United States, threatening to impair the national security.”
Companies that rely on imported steel sued the federal government in the U.S. Court of International Trade, arguing that Ross’s report violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The trade court found in 2021 that the report could not be challenged in the courts because it did not constitute a “final agency action.”
Later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit differed from the trade court and found the Ross report was in fact a final agency action. However, the appeals court held the findings of the report could not be challenged under administrative law and that the tariffs did not violate federal law.
A year ago the Supreme Court also turned away a challenge to Trump’s steel tariffs as they applied to Turkish imports. The case was Transpacific Steel LLC v. United States, court file 21-721.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on the new ruling.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have anything else to add here at this time,” Terrence Clark of the department’s Office of Public Affairs said by email.
The Epoch Times has reached out for comment to USP Holdings attorney Lewis Evart Leibowitz.
