The Trump administration is imposing new tariffs ranging from 10% to 12.5% on 60 major trading partners, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced Thursday. The tariffs will take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, just as a previous set of temporary 10% tariffs expires.
The tariffs are being imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which governs unfair foreign practices affecting U.S. commerce. Greer said his office conducted 60 investigations into potential violations of a prohibition against the importation of goods produced with forced labor and found all 60 economies that he investigated had violated the law, empowering him to impose punitive tariffs.
The new tariffs come after the Supreme Court ruled in February that most of the global tariffs President Trump imposed in 2025 violated the Constitution. The Trump administration reportedly set out to find a more durable legal basis to impose import fees on virtually all its trading partners, and the new tariffs are a result of that process.
A new legal logic: The new tariffs are designed to hold up under judicial review. Still, some legal experts question the reasoning behind the tariffs. Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer at Georgetown Law School who served in the Biden administration, told The New York Times that he doubted the administration’s explanation for the need for tariffs. “It’s not really about forced labor,” he said. Instead, the trade representative is “using this forced labor investigation as a pretext to impose tariffs that Trump wants to impose for his own economic theories and preferences.”
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden also expressed skepticism about the new tariffs. “Trump’s next trade scheme is ordering USTR to reconstruct his illegal global tariffs under the guise of addressing forced labor,” he said.
Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Greer admitted that the administration sees tariffs as an essential tool for achieving its political goals, regardless of the legal basis. “The specific authorities this administration is using have changed, but the trade strategy has not,” Greer told lawmakers. “We are committed to continuing to use tariffs and to negotiate deals to support the re-industrialization of our economy, protect American workers and increase their wages and shrink our trade deficit.”