What You Should Be Reading: May 2025

Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) writes once again about tariffs. But for once, the news from the front is…good? Like Lincoln learning of the Battle of Antietam, TPA waits for the next engagement — and hopes the judiciary will prove itself less timid than George McClellan — yet for the moment, protectionism seems likely to be on the retreat.

May’s edition begins in unorthodox fashion: with a ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade halting the bulk of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, the opinion touches several fundamentals concerning congressional delegations of power and presidentially declared emergencies. Then, a return to normalcy: the costs to small app developers of app-store-level age verification laws and a cost–benefit analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

So, without further ado…

Trump’s Tariffs Flounder

On Liberation Day, President Trump (briefly) revolutionized the U.S. tariff schedule, only quickly to relent, leaving the residue of a new 10-percent global tariff, schizophrenic rates on Chinese goods, and big promises of a flood of big new trade deals. Earlier in his administration — which, our editors have informed us, began less than six months ago — Trump imposed (and then paused, and then reimposed, and then paused…) tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

Trump built this house of cards upon the statutory foundation of 1977’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Last week, the U.S. Court of International Trade razed the administration’s legal fictions to the ground (although the ruling was subsequently stayed, allowing the administration a brief procedural respite).

The court summarized its position thus:

We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers. Two are relevant here. First, § 1702’s delegation of a power to “regulate…importation,” read in light of its legislative history and Congress’s enactment of more narrow, non-emergency legislation, at the very least does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs. … Second, IEEPA’s limited authorities may be exercised only to “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared…and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”

 Two theories of IEEPA’s grants of power to the presidency opposed one another in this case. Under neither could Trump’s unilateral protectionism be sustained, the court held. Under the administration’s expansionist reading, it could do whatever it pleased under unreviewable emergency power. Subjected to the major-questions doctrine, this argument wilted. Yet even had the government’s lawyers interpreted the IEEPA justly, the ruling states, the IEEPA itself would then have come into danger. Any law that ferries so large a raft of legislative prerogatives from Capitol Hill to the White House — as the administration believes to IEEPA to have done — will likely fall before the non-delegation doctrine (the legal doctrine which holds that the Constitution meant shall where its authors wrote the word shall, and that Congress cannot shuffle off its inherent powers to other branches).

A few points about national emergencies deserve note. The president cannot, in fact, declare whatever circumstances he objects to a national emergency. Nor can he implement whatever means — no matter how tangential — he wishes to ameliorate the causes of declared emergencies.

In a constitutional republic, the notion that the executive branch’s emergency powers must be limited — must be the exception, not the rule, and must be unleashed only in truly exceptional circumstances — should not surprise anyone or stoke controversy. However, adding to the sordid legacies of such predecessors as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump has decided on his favorite policy and rummaged around pretextually until he found a statute that could — however dubiously — further his aims.

Read the full ruling here.

International Women’s Forum: IRA Green Subsidies

The clean energy subsidies in the IRA, enacted in 2022, are the gift that keeps on taking.

Projected upon passage to cost only (only!) $391billion over a decade’s time, this boondoggle’s likely price tag has ascended into 13 figures, writes Gabriella Hoffman of the Independent Women’s Forum in a new report. “In March 2025, the Cato Institute revealed adjusted costs of IRA green subsidies would approach $1.97 trillion between 2025 and 2034,” she notes. “Should Congress fail to reform the IRA’s green provisions, their costs could balloon to between $2.04 trillion and $4.67 trillion by 2050.”

For such cost, one would think the IRA would reduce emissions (it certainly had nothing to do with reducing inflation). No dice: “A January 2023 Congressional Research Service report determined the IRA’s green provisions would reduce emissions 30 percent to 43 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels,” Hoffman writes. “Without subsidies, the same report found the U.S. was already on track to reduce emissions by between 24 percent and 35 percent by 2030 compared to 2005.”

What’s more, with implementation has come delays and failure. IRA projects have foundered, due both to economic and political sandbars. Hoffman writes that, as of “August 2024, 40 percent of IRA manufacturing jobs were ‘delayed, paused, or canceled.’” Worse still, these jobs cost taxpayers dearly. “Generally speaking, each IRA-tied job costs $2 to $7 million,” she notes.

Read the full piece here.

Trusted Future: The Huge Costs for Small Businesses of App Store Age Verification Bills

This year, bills to enforce online age verification at the level of the app store have cropped up in state legislatures nationwide — and even in Congress. Many (TPA among them) have argued that such bills, like all age verification mandates, violate the First Amendment. Moreover, they supplant parental choice with regulatory intrusions into family decision-making.

Less often discussed, such laws would cost small businesses — the proprietors of about nine in ten apps on the major app stores — greatly. According to a new analysis from Trusted Future, which examines a law enacted recently in Texas, small businesses will find themselves subjected to five-figure regulatory price tags — or worse.

“If small businesses have an estimated 3.5 million apps to update, and it conservatively costs $20,000 each to update and assure compliance, then it could cost small businesses $70 billion to comply,” Trusted Future finds. “If actual costs to small businesses are on the higher side, up to $80,000 each, then it could cost small businesses upwards of $280 billion,” the report continues (emphasis removed).

Although these mandates spring from worries about children’s online safety, their practical enforcement will have nothing to do with such issues. “For small businesses like restaurants, bike shops, and bed and breakfast establishments that have an app, but don’t host age inappropriate [sic] content, the Texas law and others like it create a huge burden with no economic or child safety benefits,” reads the report (emphasis removed). Some businesses are likely simply to discontinue their apps. Regulation is a regressive tax, and small businesses, unlike tech giants, often cannot survive regulatory onslaughts.

Read the full piece here.

Note: TPA highlights research projects that contribute meaningfully to important public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations the featured authors make.