Hundreds of Companies Sue Over Trump Tariffs

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In the race for big medical breakthroughs, it's between the US and China, and China is investing big. If Americans want access to the best treatments in the world, this is a race we need to win. Protect, defend, and keep medical research here in America.

Daniel Bach (0:18)

President Trump prepares to address the nation with plans to sell Americans on his handling of the economy. Plus, FedEx joins a growing list of companies asking for tariff refunds. And it's now four years since Russia invaded Ukraine with few signs of an end to the war.

Matthew Luxmore (0:34)

Ukraine is still very, very vulnerable to a potential backlash from Trump if he chose to do that as a response to the fact that the negotiations are not moving forward.

Daniel Bach (0:43)

It's Tuesday, February 24th. I'm Daniel Bach for the Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas. And here's the AM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

We're exclusively reporting that the Trump administration is considering placing tariffs on six industries under national security grounds. The president is looking for new ways to impose duties in his bid to reshape global trade after the Supreme Court ruled most were illegal, including those issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Business and economics editor Alex Frangos is following these developments. Alex, new potential tariffs on large-scale batteries, industrial chemicals, and power grid and telecom equipment. What is the president looking to do here?

Alex Frangos (1:34)

Yeah, well, he's basically figuring out how can he reestablish a blanket of tariffs on lots of countries around the world after the Supreme Court ruling said he can't do it the way he was doing it. So there's all these other laws with numbers that readers and listeners are going to start to get familiar with. Tariffs 301 and 232, which are different parts of the federal statutes that give the president the power to impose tariffs. And so he's added a whole bunch of new industries to these 232 national security tariffs. And the way that tariff works is that the government has to do an investigation over a number of months to establish that there's a national security threat before they can impose actual tariffs on them. So he's trying to figure out a way to fill in all the gaps that the Supreme Court ruling has left in his tariff policy.

Daniel Bach (2:22)

And per that ruling, Customs and Border Protection is telling importers it will stop collecting tariffs imposed under the Emergency Powers Act from midnight to night. We know the cost of these import taxes has hurt a lot of businesses over the past year. Are they responding to this yet?

Alex Frangos (2:38)

So you have this kind of change in tariff regimes where the old tariffs, they're going to stop collecting. There's now new tariffs that come into effect. And then businesses are saying, wait a second. We paid over $100 billion worth of tariffs last year that had been invalidated by the Supreme Court. We'd like that money back. So FedEx filed a lawsuit. There's Costco, a bunch of other companies as well, that are like, hey, Supreme Court says we don't have to pay this. Can we have our money back? I mean, we were taxed illegally, and we'd like that back. That obviously has big implications for the federal government because that money is needed for spending, for paying down debt, things like that. So there's just lots of action going on.

Daniel Bach (3:15)

And all of that comes ahead of the President's State of the Union address this evening, where we report he'll be trying to sell the public on his handling of the economy in his first year back in office. Trump has given himself a grade of A++++, but our economic report card, Alex, is a bit more mixed, right? Some measures of the economy good, some needing improvement.

Alex Frangos (3:37)

Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different things you can look at. If you look at the job market, job growth has been much slower than it was before the president took office, but it's historically at a reasonably low level. And then with the trade deficit, we see countries responding to these tariffs, helping their local industries navigate around tariffs, lower their own costs domestically and compete. And so net-net, what you have is a bigger deficit than ever. That's probably not an A++ on his report card. Inflation has come down a bit, but ordinary Americans are not feeling really good about it. And if you look at the polls, they feel that the president has been kind of distracted by foreign policy issues and focused on tariffs, which, you know, while they haven't caused the spike in inflation the way that a lot of people thought, they have put pressure on American consumers and businesses and people don't really like it. So I think that the State of the Union, from what we're hearing from our White House reporters, is the president is going to focus on the economy. He's going to try to sell to the American people that actually everything he's done has been really great for them and try to kind of reset the narrative that he is very focused on their pocketbook issues.