A push is building in the Senate to give President Donald Trump new, congressionally-backed tariff powers, after the Supreme Court struck down his broad use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose duties. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is leading the effort with a bill called the Trade Deficit Elimination Act. The case for the bill is clear; the risk is that it concentrates trade authority in the executive branch more durably than IEEPA ever did.
What the bill would do
Scott's legislation would direct U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to compile an annual watch list of countries carrying bilateral goods trade deficits with the United States. Each country on that list would be classified as a "trade deficit economy." From that designation, the president could impose, raise, lower, suspend, or modify tariffs on imports from the listed countries without seeking a full congressional vote.
Consultation with the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees is required, but approval is not. The bill carves out exemptions for products deemed critical to domestic supply chains, national security, or where alternative sourcing is unavailable. Its legal basis, per Scott's office, sits under Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution, separate from the IEEPA authority the Supreme Court rejected. Sens. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Tim Sheehy of Montana have signed on as co-sponsors.
Why now
The timing is not accidental. The Trump administration refunded $100 billion in tariff revenue the day before Scott introduced the bill. That refund was a direct consequence of the Supreme Court ruling that Trump lacked IEEPA authority for the "liberation day" duties he had imposed across the globe. Scott's bill is an attempt to build a durable legal scaffold, one that carries explicit congressional sanction and is therefore harder to challenge in court.
Scott frames the effort around national security, arguing that countries with longstanding access to U.S. markets have crowded American products out of their own.
The counterargument
The trouble is that a prior round of Trump tariffs produced results Scott's bill is meant to fix, and the data on that round are not encouraging. A report referenced in the same news dispatch found that the earlier tariffs did not restore American factory jobs. The bill's exemptions for supply chain and national security products acknowledge that pursuing zero bilateral deficits isn't workable across the board. And the consultation requirement with congressional committees, which demands no final vote, reads more as a procedural safeguard than a genuine check on executive action.
On balance
Three Republican senators have co-sponsored the Trade Deficit Elimination Act, and its constitutional grounding gives it a better chance of surviving judicial review than IEEPA-based tariffs did. Whether the full Senate takes it up, and whether committee consultation amounts to real oversight, is the line to watch.