Companies hurt by the tariffs could sue Trump if he uses IEEPA, but they’re unlikely to find a judge that would issue an injunction to stop the order from going into force and the lawsuit itself could take years to resolve, said Everett Eissenstat, a former Trump White House official who now is a partner at Squire Patton Boggs.
Still, Trump’s action under the law may be easier to challenge legally if he uses the growing U.S. trade deficit as justification for urgent tariff action. The United States has run a trade deficit every year since 1975, making it hard to claim the current trade deficit is an emergency, said Ed Gresser, a former USTR official now at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank.
The U.S. economy has quadrupled in size over the past five decades to more than $22 trillion and employment has doubled to 158 million jobs even though the trade deficit has increased, Gresser added. And while the dollar value of the trade deficit has hit record highs in the range of $1 trillion annually, the trade gap actually has declined as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product from the peak level of 5.7 percent in the mid-2000s to 2.9 percent in 2023.
