The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling striking down President Donald Trump’s IEEPA tariffs looked like a legal resolution. It wasn’t. Within 96 hours, a replacement tariff had been announced, raised and lowered again — and the administration had signaled it would pursue its trade agenda through other legal authorities. CCI’s editorial director, Jennifer L. Gaskin, analyzes what the ruling means for compliance officers, GCs and boards — and what companies need to do right now. The short answer? Get your documentation in order and don’t wait for the dust to settle.
A 6-3 Supreme Court majority formally rejected President Donald Trump’s use of reciprocal tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) on Feb. 20, but the ruling has proved less an ending than a starting gun.
Shortly after the ruling, Trump announced a replacement 10% global tariff, which would later rise to 15%. However, by the time the new tariffs were formally implemented, they had fallen back to 10%, catching executives and foreign leaders off-guard.
The whipsaw — a court ruling, a replacement tariff, a rate increase, a rollback, all within 96 hours — is not an anomaly; it is the new operating environment. At companies on the tariff roller coaster, and their compliance officers, GCs and board directors, the hard work is just beginning.
What the ruling did — and didn’t do
The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by two Trump-appointed justices, held that IEEPA’s authorization for the president to regulate imports does not include the power to tax them: “When Congress grants the power to impose tariffs, it does so clearly and with careful constraints. It did neither in IEEPA.”
Critically, the ruling did not strike down IEEPA itself, and it did not rewrite any statute. It held that the law does not authorize presidential tariff authority, meaning the more than $160 billion estimated to have been collected under IEEPA was unlawful from the start.
Sector-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum and a range of other imports — imposed during Trump’s first term under separate legal authority — remain fully in place, with some rates scheduled to rise further in 2027.
What changed is the broadest layer of the tariff regime: the sweeping, country-by-country reciprocal tariffs imposed under IEEPA. Those are gone, but the administration began replacing them within hours. A new global tariff, imposed under a different statute, took effect on Feb. 24, just four days after the SCOTUS ruling. It is temporary by law; longer-term replacements, through trade investigations that can take months to yield results, are already underway.
Meanwhile, the administration is considering new national security tariffs on at least six additional industries under Section 232 — including large-scale batteries, industrial chemicals, and power grid and telecom equipment — on top of existing investigations into sectors like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Section 232 tariffs, once imposed, can be altered by the president unilaterally and have so far faced no serious legal challenge.
The bottom line for compliance officers, as Kroll’s Nick Baker puts it, is straightforward: “Uncertainty is back in full swing, and we should expect the landscape to continue to change over the next three years.”
For companies trying to impose order on a fast-moving situation, Baker outlined two immediate priorities: assessing the scope of the new global tariff, which he notes largely mirrors that of IEEPA, and getting documentation in order.
“The best course of action is to ensure that documents and records are available, organized and clearly show the IEEPA tariffs paid and timing,” Baker said. “You should also be comparing transaction documents to (the federal government’s centralized system for tracking import and export record) and running a liquidation report with your broker.”
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Read moreDetailsThe refund question: likely, but not soon
The ruling’s most immediate practical consequence for many companies is not the tariff regime that replaced IEEPA but a multibillion-dollar question the court declined to answer: What happens to the money already collected?
The short answer from trade lawyers is that refunds are likely — eventually. The Supreme Court was unambiguous that the tariffs were unlawful from the start, making it difficult, as one trade attorney told The Associated Press, to imagine “no refund option” given how decisively the court ruled. But the path to recovery is neither clear nor fast.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set the tone over the weekend after the SCOTUS ruling, telling CNN that refunds are “not up to the administration — it is up to the lower court.” Trump himself told reporters he expected the issue to remain in litigation for years. The Court of International Trade (CIT) in New York is expected to oversee the process in coordination with Customs and Border Patrol (CPB), but the mechanics remain entirely unsettled. TD Securities estimates a 12 -to 18-month timeline on the optimistic end.
“There is a strong likelihood that the government will try to curb the financial exposure, with lower courts potentially looking for ways to manage or narrow the sweeping fiscal implications of ordering millions in refunds,” Laura Baucus, head of national law firm Dykema’s supply chain and automotive practice groups, told CCI.
Importers generally have 180 days after an entry is liquidated — the point at which CPB finalizes the duty amount on a shipment, which may differ from what was initially paid at the border — to file a protest and request a refund from CPB.
Baker notes that liquidated entries are likely to be treated differently than more recent ones when any refund process is formalized, making it important to understand the status of each entry individually. Importers that did not file a CBP protest within 180 days of liquidation are not necessarily without recourse, however: The CIT ruled in December 2025 that companies can pursue refunds directly through the court under a separate two-year statute of limitations, without first going through the protest process.
Importers should prepare for refunds by determining what entries remain unliquidated, which have liquidated within 180 days and remain available for protest and which have liquidated beyond that window — each category is likely to follow a different path, according to a Morgan Lewis client alert published on the day of the SCOTUS ruling.
Downstream purchasers — companies that didn’t pay tariffs directly to CBP but absorbed cost increases passed through by suppliers — face a murkier picture still. Their path to recovery runs not through CBP or the CIT but through their own supply contracts. Procurement and legal teams at companies in this position should be reviewing supplier agreements now for tariff pass-through clauses and assessing whether any recourse exists against suppliers who raised prices to cover IEEPA tariffs. For foreign companies that absorbed losses, adjusted pricing or lost contracts as a result of the IEEPA tariffs, the picture is even less clear: The US refund mechanism is built around domestic importers of record, and what recourse, if any, exists for non-US businesses remains an open question.
One additional wrinkle: Consumers who paid higher prices as companies passed tariff costs down the supply chain are unlikely to see any direct recovery. Refunds, where they occur, will flow to importers of record — not to the end buyers who ultimately bore much of the economic burden. However, Morgan Lewis attorneys warned, companies that raised prices as a result of the tariffs and said so publicly outside of marketing messaging should carefully review those statements if they get refunds: In some cases, the combination could trigger price-gouging investigations from the Federal Trade Commission or state attorneys general.
Governance in an unpredictable environment
Perhaps the most significant compliance challenge the ruling surfaces is not legal or financial but structural: How do organizations build durable governance frameworks around a risk that moves faster than governance processes are designed to handle?
Baker’s answer is broad visibility across the business.
“Assessing and responding to trade risks takes a cross-functional team to ensure that companies are looking at the tariff impacts from all angles,” he said. “Risk, legal, finance, compliance, procurement, customer relations all need to be part of the discussion. Many companies will be quickly restarting their tariff task forces and should ensure those groups have visibility throughout the supply chain.”
The events of the past week illustrate exactly why that visibility matters. The replacement tariff rate moved from 10% to 15% in 48 hours before sliding back to 10% by the time the new tariffs had taken effect. New trade investigations were announced within hours of the ruling, and the administration has been explicit that its revenue targets for the year are unchanged.
And the instability may outlast the Trump Administration. As Brookings Institution senior fellow Kari Heerman wrote, “US trade policy will continue to turn on executive discretion exercised through statutes never intended for systemic redesign — leaving businesses and allies uncertain about the direction of US policy at a moment strategic clarity is most needed.”
The implication is clear for corporate integrity professionals and directors: Trade policy uncertainty isn’t a Trumpian bug; it’s a durable feature of the business environment. The question is not when things will stabilize but whether the organization has built the infrastructure required to navigate a landscape that may keep shifting for years.
The ruling changed the legal vehicle but not the destination.
Jennifer L. Gaskin is editorial director of Corporate Compliance Insights. A newsroom-forged journalist, she began her career in community newspapers. Her first assignment was covering a county council meeting where the main agenda item was whether the clerk's office needed a new printer (it did). Starting with her early days at small local papers, Jennifer has worked as a reporter, photographer, copy editor, page designer, manager and more. She joined the staff of Corporate Compliance Insights in 2021. 
