Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Global Tariffs

The U.S. Supreme Court just handed President Donald Trump a surprise defeat, ruling 6-3 on Friday to strike down the president’s sweeping global tariffs.

The court said the president had exceeded his authority by using a federal emergency-powers law to enact the tariffs, which often imposed stiff taxes on imported goods. The court’s decision represents a major blow to Trump’s economic policy.

Speaking at a press conference Friday afternoon, the president called the Supreme Court’s decision “deeply disappointing” and plans to retaliate against the ruling by signing an executive order to impose a 10 percent global tariff for 150 days, the Associated Press reported.

States and small businesses across the country had challenged the tariffs, noting that levies such as the ones Trump imposed don’t actually financially impact the exporting country but instead place the burden of increased costs on domestic importers and U.S. consumers.

“This ruling strikes at the core of the administration’s economic doctrine,” Nigel Green, CEO of global financial advisory firm deVere Group, said in a statement. “Tariffs were sold as a lever to rebalance trade and protect U.S. industry. In practice, they have functioned as a tax on importers, many of whom passed costs directly to consumers.”

On April 2, 2025, the president held what he dubbed “Liberation Day,” during which he announced sweeping global tariffs that included a universal 10 percent tax on all imported goods. This month, Trump had set up a process to impose tariffs as high as 25 percent on goods from countries doing business with Iran, Bloomberg reported.

The Supreme Court’s decision Friday could reduce the average U.S. effective tariff rate from 13.6 percent to 6.5 percent, a rate not seen since March, according to Bloomberg.

“The Supreme Court did not end tariff policy today, it ended unilateral tariff improvisation,” said Sam Chandan, director of the Chao-Hon Chen Institute for Global Real Estate Finance at New York University. “Markets do not fear tariffs as much as they dislike the unpredictability that follows from the absence of a clear framework. If Congress engages the executive branch and that framework comes about, it would at a minimum give businesses something they can forecast and plan around. In that sense, it’s a positive for business planning that the court has restored the constitutional locus of tariff policy to Congress.”

Leaders in the commercial real estate sector had been feeling the impact of the tariffs in the past year, with many highlighting uncertainty as one of the biggest impacts of tariffs. 

“It’s hard to know exactly what’s happening with the president,” Alex Redfearn, founder, president and CEO of Redfearn Capital, said last April at an event hosted by Commercial Observer. “A lot of it is posturing. It feels like a lot of it will come off. It’s hard to underwrite that. But uncertainty is tough for tenants. It’s tough for landlords. It’s tough for everybody who’s trying to make a decision.”

Other CRE players were feeling a more direct impact from the tariffs. Andrew Till, chief operating officer and principal at development firm Baron Property Group, told CO last year that the firm was already feeling the burden of Trump’s tariffs as the cost of construction materials — particularly glass — had already started to skyrocket. 

“Corporate margins have tightened in sectors reliant on global supply chains, and investment decisions have been delayed amid policy uncertainty,” deVere Group’s Green said. 

Chandan says the Supreme Court decision is a positive for CRE as a whole, if only marginally. 

“CRE has been quietly absorbing tariff-induced cost pressures throughout the development cycle, in construction materials, fixtures, equipment, and supply chain logistics,” he said. “A partial rollback of IEEPA tariffs represents cost-side relief for new development, though the steel and aluminum tariffs that remain in place continue to exert upward pressure on hard construction costs. The net effect is a modestly improved underwriting environment, but not a wholesale reset.”

In the past, Trump has said that “tariff” is his favorite word, and that imposing such a concept would make the U.S. “rich as hell” — although, spoiler alert, it hasn’t quite worked out the way he wanted.

“Without tariffs, this country would be in so much trouble right now,” Trump said at a steel manufacturing factory in Georgia Thursday night, prior to the Supreme Court’s announcement.

Yet the high court doesn’t appear to agree with that assessment. 

“When Congress grants the power to impose tariffs, it does so clearly and with careful constraints. It did neither in [this case],”  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s majority opinion. 

Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two justices appointed by Trump, voted alongside Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson to strike down the tariffs. 

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.