The Supreme Court’s ruling on IEEPA has subtly shifted the tariff debate from being largely constitutional to increasingly fiscal.
IEEPA reportedly generated revenue in excess of $130 billion. Reconstructing that scale through narrower, investigation-led statutes may prove harder to achieve. Section 232 is product-specific and evidence-driven. Section 301 is country-specific but also procedurally complex. Neither naturally matches IEEPA for breadth or speed of implementation.
If replacement tariff income falls meaningfully short, or indeed if refunds are judged to be due – a question that must first work its way through the Court of International Trade before potentially returning to the Supreme Court; fiscal implications rather than legal architecture may become the main focal point. A revenue gap would influence deficit optics, potentially increase issuance pressure, and raise scrutiny on how the administration plans to fund its broader agenda.
Against that backdrop, the enforced shift of gears following the Supreme Court ruling on IEEPA as a tariff and revenue collection vehicle, while a complication for the Trump administration, may also come to be seen as affording greater clarity and continuity in trade policy – potentially capable of sustaining beyond President Trump’s term in office.
Tariffs can no longer be simply calculated, as they were on Liberation Day, as “the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners.” The post-IEEPA ruling environment demands a different kind of analysis.
Sections 232 and 301 will still offer the administration meaningful leverage, but the groundwork is more detailed and evidence driven.
The Section 232 investigation process is perpetual in nature. Investigation requests are fed into the Commerce Department machine at one end and, within 270 days, an output in the form of a finding emerges. That finding is put before the President, who then has a further window, typically 90 days, to decide whether to concur and what action, if any, to take. In contrast to the IEEPA approach, the principal analysis must be articulated not on a country-by-country basis first, but on a material-by-material or industry-by-industry basis. Where are the domestic vulnerabilities? What external factors give rise to national security risk? What are the statistics underpinning the assertion?
We have recent insight into how this process functions in practice through the Section 232 investigation into processed critical minerals. Initiated in April 2025, the investigation ran its statutory course, with Commerce delivering its report to the President in October 2025.
The findings concluded that processed critical minerals and their derivative products are essential to U.S. national security, embedded across defence industrial supply chains and critical infrastructure sectors including advanced weapons systems, energy storage, telecommunications and transportation. The report also identified price volatility and concentrated foreign processing capacity as factors weakening domestic investment and resilience.
The President concurred with the Commerce findings. However, no immediate tariffs were imposed. Instead, the proclamation directed the Secretary of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to initiate negotiations with foreign partners and to develop strategies to reduce reliance on critical mineral imports, expand recycling and reprocessing technologies, and deepen cooperation with allies. Trade-restrictive measures, including tariffs or minimum import pricing, were left available as escalation tools if negotiations failed to sufficiently mitigate the risk.
That sequencing is telling us that when required to operate within Section 232, the administration must build and defend its industrial case before acting.
In parallel sits Project Vault, the initiative aimed at securing critical and strategic materials with greater stability of access and price. Such stability is unlikely to come at spot-market pricing; resilience typically carries a cost, whether through long-term procurement contracts, strategic stockpiling, or support for domestic processing capacity. If Project Vault represents the operational response to identified vulnerabilities, Section 232 can be viewed as the mechanism that formally documented the vulnerability and justified the initiative.
The natural consequence of this shift is a move away from the transactional character of broad-based tariffs we have rapidly become accustomed to. Quid pro quo investment into the United States becomes harder to justify unless it directly correlates to the specific material or industry triggering the levy. Policy becomes more sector-specific and industrially grounded.
In this light, Secretary Bessent’s remark last week at the Economic Club of Dallas that it is important to separate the noise from the signal takes on a different meaning. He framed the IEEPA ruling as noise, arguing that tariff architecture remains intact. That may be correct in the narrow sense. But it could equally be argued that the loss of IEEPA’s breadth forces policy into a more structured, industrially grounded form. It marks a step away from instantaneous leverage and toward sector-specific industrial analysis, offering the prospect of a more durable and predictable architecture.
Important Disclaimer –
This article is intended for general information purposes only and reflects the market environment at the time of writing. It does not constitute investment advice, a personal recommendation, or an offer to engage in any trading activity. The content does not take into account individual objectives or circumstances and should not be relied upon as the basis for any investment decision. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
Content may have been created by persons who have, have previously had, or may in the future have personal interests in securities or other financial products referred to therein. All conflicts and potential conflicts relating to our business are managed in accordance with our conflicts of interest policy. For more information, please refer to our Summary of Conflicts of Interest Policy.
For more information and important risk disclosures, please see our Derivative Product Trading Notes and Privacy Policy. AMT Futures Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority