At 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Friday, July 24, a 10 percent global tariff that President Trump had leaned on for five months quietly expired. Most coverage this week framed what happened next as simply “more tariffs.” That undersells it. What actually happened is that the administration retired a fragile, time-limited emergency power and replaced it, in the same instant, with something built to last indefinitely. The rate barely changed. The legal foundation underneath it did, and that is the part worth understanding.
What expired, and what took its place
The expiring tariff had been running on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision that lets a president impose tariffs to address a specific economic problem but caps them at 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them. Trump reached for it in February, hours after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that his broader, IEEPA-based global tariffs were unlawful. The Section 122 tariff was always going to run out. On Thursday, July 23, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer signed off on its replacement: a permanent two-tier tariff of 10 or 12.5 percent on 60 trading partners, covering 59 countries plus the European Union, justified this time under Section 301 of the same 1974 law, the statute the administration also used against Brazil in a separate action that same week, a 25 percent tariff over unrelated disputes involving digital trade, anti-corruption enforcement and deforestation, effective July 22. There is no clock running on this one.
The legal basis is forced labor. Per USTR’s own fact sheet, the tariffs follow a Section 301 investigation opened in March into the failure of dozens of economies to ban imports made with forced labor, and countries that have committed to adopting such a ban face the lower 10 percent rate, while those that haven’t face 12.5 percent. USTR says the action covers 99.4 percent of all U.S. imports, with exemptions carved out for energy, many food categories, and goods already hit by separate Section 232 tariffs.
The case the administration is making
USTR frames this as a decades-old fight finally getting teeth. The agency’s fact sheet points to concrete enforcement already underway: in June, Customs and Border Protection issued withhold orders against copper from a Serbian producer and apparel from a Jordanian manufacturer, both tied to forced labor findings. USTR also notes that when Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA in his first term, he secured forced labor commitments from Canada and Mexico, and that ten trading partners have since agreed to similar bans as part of newer reciprocal trade deals.
Testifying before the Senate this week, Greer put it in blunter terms: the problems the administration is trying to fix are generational, he said, and won’t be solved overnight, but they have to be addressed. Not everyone buys the framing. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon told Greer directly that the White House had, in his words, dug up an old law to make things more expensive for Americans, and that the forced labor justification is really just a vehicle for rebuilding the tariffs the courts already struck down.
Why the legal vehicle matters more than the rate
This is the part that gets lost in day-to-day coverage. A tariff imposed under Section 122 is inherently temporary and was born from an emergency declaration a court had already started picking apart. A tariff imposed under Section 301 rests on a formal, monthslong investigation record, has no built-in expiration, and sits on much sturdier legal ground precisely because it wasn’t the mechanism the Supreme Court objected to in the first place. The administration didn’t just replace one tariff with a similar one. It swapped a challengeable, sunsetting power for a durable one, at the exact moment the temporary version was set to lapse anyway.
Georgetown Law’s Kathleen Claussen, who studies trade law, described the resulting picture as a genuinely more complicated one than existed even a year ago, now that tariffs authorized under four different numbered statutes, 122, 232, 301 and 338, can all be running at once, each with its own product exemptions and its own logic for how they interact.
Canada is the clearest example of the administration reaching for whatever tool is available. This week Trump also signed new 50 percent tariffs on some Canadian goods using Section 338 of the same 1930 Tariff Act, a provision that, per reporting this week, has never before been used to impose tariffs in nearly a century on the books. Those take effect in a matter of weeks, though they could still be negotiated away as part of a broader USMCA renegotiation.
What to watch
USTR has already signaled this isn’t the end of the list: a separate Section 301 investigation into more than a dozen countries and the EU, this time over alleged manufacturing overproduction, is still open and could produce another round of tariffs on the same durable legal footing. Meanwhile, the exemption for energy imports in this week’s action is worth watching alongside the energy price shock still working through global markets since the Iran conflict escalated earlier this year, since that shock is also the reason the ECB found itself raising rates in June instead of cutting them. Anyone tracking whether that energy pressure is easing or building again can watch it directly through live Brent crude pricing.
The honest scorecard on the stated goal is still thin. Manufacturing employment in the United States remains below where it stood when Trump took office, despite more than a year of tariff actions aimed at reviving it. What has clearly grown, though, is the durability of the tariff regime itself. The rate paid at the border barely moved this week. The odds of a court unwinding it just dropped considerably.
