On July 24, 2026, the Trump administration replaced a temporary 10% global tariff with a new wave of duties on more than 80 countries, covering 99.4% of all U.S. imports. The new tariffs, issued under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, set two rates: 10% for countries that have adopted and enforced laws banning goods made with forced labor, and 12.5% for those that have not. The previous 10% global levy expired at 12:01 a.m. that same day (The Hill).

Countries that committed to adopt and enforce forced-labor import prohibitions received the lower 10% rate. That group includes Canada, the European Union (all 27 member states), India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Countries that did not adopt such prohibitions face the higher 12.5% rate, including Australia, Brazil, China, and Japan. The U.S. Trade Representative's office (USTR) investigated 60 economies to determine whether each was effectively blocking goods produced with forced labor from entering the U.S. market (The Guardian; USTR).

The USTR formally launched the Section 301 investigations on March 11, 2026, with the initiation notice published in the Federal Register on March 17. Proposed determinations and tariff actions followed on June 2, with a public comment period opening June 5. A three-day public hearing was held July 7–9 at the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. The final Federal Register notice announcing the actions was published on July 23, 2026 (Federal Register; Federal Register; USTR).

The July 23 action was also published on whitehouse.gov as a presidential memorandum titled "Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301," tagged with the topic "Forced Labor." The forced-labor duties that the final tariffs largely tracked were originally proposed on June 1, 2026, per Reuters (Reuters; whitehouse.gov).

To understand why the administration used Section 301 this time, it helps to look at the legal timeline. On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) — the 1977 statute Trump had used for earlier tariff waves — does not give the President authority to impose tariffs. The majority held that the power to tax during peacetime belongs to Congress alone (Supreme Court).

After that ruling, Trump imposed a 150-day, 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a stopgap. Section 122 allows the President to impose temporary tariffs of up to 15% for a maximum of 150 days to address balance-of-payments deficits, but it is not designed as a long-term trade tool. That temporary levy was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. on July 24, 2026. The Section 301 tariffs were issued just before that deadline, keeping the tariff regime in place under a different legal authority (The Guardian).

Section 301 works differently. It allows the USTR to investigate and respond to unfair trade practices by foreign governments, and it has been the primary legal vehicle for U.S. trade enforcement for decades. The Section 301 tariffs Trump imposed on China during his first term survived court challenges, setting a precedent the administration is now testing at a far broader scale (NPR).

The economic stakes are substantial. The New York Federal Reserve estimated that 90% of the economic burden imposed by tariffs is passed on to U.S. consumers and businesses. A tariff covering 99.4% of imports functions, in practice, as a broad-based tax on imported goods across nearly every category of commerce (The Guardian; The Hill).

The broader context here is an administration systematically testing the boundaries of executive tariff authority across multiple statutes. The IEEPA route was foreclosed by the Supreme Court in February. Section 122 provided a 150-day bridge. Section 301 is now the third legal framework invoked in roughly six months. Each pivot came just as the previous authority approached its legal or temporal limit, and each has drawn the tariff regime into a different statutory framework with distinct procedural requirements, scope constraints, and vulnerability to judicial review.

The central open question is whether the Section 301 precedent from the China case extends to a tariff regime covering nearly all U.S. imports and grounded in foreign labor practices rather than traditional trade violations like intellectual property theft or market access barriers. Alan Wolff, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former deputy director-general of the WTO, called the new tariffs "another case of presidential overreach" and predicted that the Supreme Court would likely overturn them if challenged (The Guardian). An administration official countered that the Section 301 approach "encourages stronger labor rights enforcement abroad" (New York Post).

The Section 301 process has, at minimum, been more procedurally elaborate than the IEEPA tariffs it replaces. The USTR conducted formal investigations across 60 economies, issued proposed determinations, held three days of public hearings, and published Federal Register notices at each stage. Whether that procedural record will insulate the tariffs from a Learning Resources-style challenge remains the central open question. The first-term China Section 301 tariffs survived judicial review, but those targeted a single country over specific trade practices. The current action targets more than 80 countries simultaneously, conditioned on their domestic labor-law enforcement, and covers virtually the entirety of U.S. imports. A legal challenge appears likely given Wolff's assessment and the trajectory established by Learning Resources.