Mark DiPlacido

The president will have to use alternative authorities that are more well-established under the law to pursue its tariffs.

Thank you for having me.

Sure.

So the tariff authority that the president will be using now is called Section 122.

It's under the Trade Act of 1974.

That's the same trade act that gave the section through one tariff authority that the president used against China in the first administration.

This particular provision, Section 122, has not been invoked by a president before, but the authority is based on what's called a balance of payments issue.

That essentially means that the United States is running a trade deficit.

It gives the president authority to respond to that.

temporarily, so the statutory limit on the authority is 150 days, up to a rate of 15%.

The president has initially put that rate at 10%, and the authority will expire and require Congress to approve the new rate in 150 days, which should be sometime in the third week of June, July, excuse me.

So what that 150 days is going to allow the president to do is to pursue additional investigations under Section 301, which it has used in the past and has a strong legal backing at this point.

and under Section 232, which are sectoral tariffs that are justified by national security concerns.

This would be the authority that the president has used on steel and aluminum, copper, timber, computing, robots and some other sort of major sectors of the U.S.

economy.

So I think the administration is really seeing an opportunity to to buy some time because those those well-established authorities that are indefinite and don't have that 150 day cap require an investigation and

a common period essentially like any other major regulation.

Yes.

So if you look at, for example, the 301 tariffs that were implemented against Chinese goods in 2018, those are still in place today.

Those were kept, largely kept by the Biden administration and across the second Trump administration.