The first reaction in most sourcing teams was relief, and the relief did not survive contact with the tariff schedule. In February 2026 the US Supreme Court held that IEEPA does not authorise the President to impose tariffs of indefinite scope, and struck those tariffs down. Within a week you could hear people describing the decision as the end of the tariff era.
Then somebody pulled a duty calculation on a product that had been carrying more than one measure, and the number barely moved.
That gap between what the ruling said and what importers pay is the most instructive thing to come out of the year, and it points at how sourcing decisions are going to have to be made from here.
The ruling settled a question of authority
What the Court examined was whether a particular statute gave a particular actor the power to do a particular thing. IEEPA is emergency economic powers legislation. The holding was that it does not stretch to tariffs of indefinite scope.
Nothing in that reasoning says anything about whether tariffs are good policy, whether they will continue, or whether the goods on your bill of materials will get cheaper. It says that this instrument could not carry that weight. You can read the whole thing and come away with no information at all about your landed cost, which is a strange experience if you came looking for one.
Sourcing strategies built on the assumption that a court would eventually make the problem go away were resting on a category error. Courts resolve questions of authority. Tariff exposure is a question of which authority is being used.
The legislative route has its own arithmetic
The other half of the picture sits in Congress, and it gets discussed far less because it is procedural and procedure is boring.
An emergency-based measure can in principle be ended by legislation, which sounds like a straightforward check until you look at what has to happen for a vote to reach the floor at all. The arithmetic of how blocked tariff-termination votes affect import costs gets the least attention of anything in this story, and it is the part that determines how long a measure actually lives. A tariff nobody will schedule a vote on is a tariff that persists by default, regardless of how many members would vote against it if asked.
Which means the timeline you are planning against is not a policy timeline. It is a calendar of procedural opportunities, and those are much harder to forecast than a rate change.
Why most of the wall is still standing
The practical takeaway from February is the one that got the least airtime. Section 301 and Section 232 tariffs rest on different statutes, and the IEEPA ruling did not disturb them.
That is not a technicality. It is the whole shape of the situation. Section 301 comes out of trade-remedy authority tied to findings about another country’s practices. Section 232 comes out of national security authority tied to findings about specific imports and the industrial base. Different statutes, different findings, different procedural histories, different vulnerabilities. A decision about the reach of emergency economic powers tells you nothing about any of them.
So the importer who had been treating “tariffs” as one object got a lesson in the cost of that abstraction. The importer who knew, line by line, which measure was attached to which of their HTS classifications under which statute could work out their exposure the same afternoon. Everyone else spent a fortnight asking their broker.
Worth being honest about why the abstraction is so common. Nobody sets out to track duty at the statute level. The information arrives as a total on a broker’s worksheet, the total is what finance sees, and the total is what gets planned against. Splitting it back out into its components is tedious work with no obvious owner, and it only becomes urgent on the day a court removes one of the components. Every line, every measure. That is the level at which the question gets answerable.
The refund path taught the more useful lesson
The Court did not itself order refunds. The Court of International Trade later ordered refunds to importers of record, the government appealed that order, and so the refund route remained contested rather than settled. CBP stood up a phased process.
Sit with that sequence for a moment, because it is the template. A measure is imposed, relied on for years, then found to have exceeded the authority claimed for it, and the money does not come back automatically or quickly or to everyone. It comes back through a process, to parties who are on the record as having a claim, subject to further appeal.
The mechanism for being on the record has not changed and it is not exotic. A post summary correction fixes an entry summary while the entry is still unliquidated. A protest challenges the determination after liquidation. Both are ordinary procedural tools available to anyone who bothered to keep track of which of their entries carried which measure. Importers who could produce that mapping were positioned. Importers who could not were reading their own entry history for the first time under pressure.
The durable lesson has almost nothing to do with IEEPA:
- Entries are the unit of record, so the entry data is the asset, and it is worth being able to query it by measure and statute rather than only by shipment.
- Preserving a claim happens before you know whether the claim is worth anything, which makes it an operating habit rather than a decision.
- A refund built on a classification you cannot defend is a refund claim that invites a look at the classification.
Sourcing that indexes on statutes rather than on rates
The version of tariff strategy that dominated the last few years was arithmetic. Compare the rate here against the rate there, add freight, pick the cheaper origin, sign a two-year agreement.
What the year suggests is that the rate is the least stable input in that model, and the statute behind the rate carries better information. A measure grounded in a national security finding about an industrial sector behaves differently over a decade than a measure grounded in an emergency declaration. One has an administrative record, an agency process and a constituency behind it. The other has a proclamation.
You can price that difference, roughly, without any numbers at all. Ask of each exposure: what authority is this resting on, how contested is that authority, who would have to act to change it, and what would the transition look like if they did. Then ask which of your supplier agreements would survive each answer.
Teams that run the exercise tend to come out of it with fewer single-origin commitments and shorter contract terms on the exposed lines. What they are buying is optionality against their own uncertainty rather than against any particular rate.
Origin becomes the load-bearing question
If measures are attached to statutes and statutes are attached to countries and sectors, then the question of where a good comes from carries more weight every year.
Country of origin for tariff purposes is a legal determination, and the test is substantial transformation: whether processing in a country produced a new and different article with a new name, character or use. Moving final assembly is not the same as changing origin. Plenty of supply chain reconfiguration over the past few years was sold internally as tariff mitigation when what actually happened was that a box got packed somewhere else.
The uncomfortable part is that origin is the determination most likely to be examined and the one most companies document worst. The classification sits in a system. The origin claim sits in an assumption about a supplier’s process that nobody has verified, supported by a certificate the supplier filled in themselves.
You can test your own position quickly enough. Pick a line where the origin changed in the past three years and ask what physically changed in the production process. If the answer describes a different factory doing the same operations to the same inputs, the claim is thinner than the paperwork suggests. If the answer describes a change in what the good is, it holds.
Over a decade, that is where the pressure lands.
The advice written while the question was open aged well
Go back to what people were writing about what importers should be doing while IEEPA sits at the Court and the striking thing is how little of it turned out to be about the ruling. Map your entries to measures. Keep your classification defensible. Preserve claims procedurally. Know which statute each exposure rests on. Document origin properly.
Every item on that list was worth doing before February 2026 and every item was still worth doing afterwards, whichever way the refund appeal goes. Which is a decent test for any piece of trade advice, honestly: if it stops being useful when the news changes, it was never advice about your supply chain.
The companies that came out of the year in good shape had predicted nothing. For them the ruling was a lookup. For everyone else it was an investigation.