Scott Lincicome is vice president of general economics and the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Inu Manak is a senior fellow for international trade at the Council on Foreign Relations.
An Illinois supplier of nuts, bolts and screws could be all that keeps President Donald Trump’s national security tariffs from escalating into a torrent of government overreach.
Since the president announced sweeping tariffs last year, American businesses have worked diligently to navigate a confounding maze of new and overlapping trade regulations — but additional government obstacles keep popping up, often without notice, and businesses are left facing a gargantuan and unexpected tax bill.
That’s what happened to Express Fasteners, LTD, which is now suing the administration in a case that reveals the opaque and arbitrary nature of Trump’s tariffs, the dramatic expansion of the administrative state behind them and a desperate need to reform the laws governing these levies.
Trump’s “emergency” tariffs — which imposed taxes on nearly all imports from almost every country in the world — have made headlines, but he continues to deploy his first-term tariff sweetheart: Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. The law, which authorizes the president to “adjust” imports that threaten to impair national security, was rarely invoked before Trump — just 26 times in 54 years. By contrast, Trump initiated eight investigations during his first term and applied broad tariffs on steel and aluminum. Last year, he launched 12 more investigations and imposed new tariffs on automotive goods, trucks, copper and wood products. In just five years, Trump has been responsible for 43 percent of all Section 232 investigations and almost all Section 232 tariffs.
The president’s Section 232 adventurism hasn’t stopped there. In 2025, Trump increased his first-term steel and aluminum tariffs to 50 percent and eliminated various exemptions. He also invoked the law’s ambiguous mention of “derivative[s]” products to apply the metals tariffs to downstream items and created a process for U.S. companies to petition the government to expand protection. As a result, hundreds of new metal products — such as utensils, canned foods, exercise equipment and appliances — are now subject to tariffs. Today, steel derivatives account for most of the imports affected by the Section 232 taxes.
That’s where Express Fasteners comes in. U.S. businesses that import items containing steel or aluminum now pay a tariff on their embedded amount, by value. Many U.S. companies had never considered the precise metal content of their imports, but they nevertheless adapted to follow the new regulations.
Express Fasteners is among those firms. It says it carefully followed U.S. Customs and Border Protection instructions to determine its imports’ steel and aluminum content. For things unrelated to the steel and aluminum inputs, such as the costs of machining and fabricating and the seller’s profit, the company applied the lower reciprocal tariff rate for the finished item’s country of origin — in this case, Taiwan.
Yet when Express Fasteners received its bill from CBP, the entire value of its imports were hit with the 50 percent Section 232 tariff. CBP attributes this to an unsigned internal memo that interpreted the original presidential proclamation more stringently than what the agency communicated in June 2025. That memo was never filed in the Federal Register and received no public comment. This blatant regulatory overreach is what Express Fasteners is now challenging in court.
The court’s ruling will matter for many other American firms that have seen increased costs due to Trump’s complicated Section 232 tariffs. The bigger issue, however, is not the agency’s guidance, the administration’s manipulation of the regulatory process, or even Trump’s deep and abiding love of tariffs; it’s in Section 232 itself. As we warned years ago, Section 232 lacks clear limits on the president’s tariff authority and contains numerous provisions, such as those for derivatives, that are so vague and discretionary as to invite blatant manipulation. With Section 232 investigations expanding rapidly in Trump’s second term, the abuse will surely grow.
That problem can’t be fixed by the courts, in this case or any other. Section 232 must be amended, at least to require legislative sign-off on any new or expanded tariffs implemented under the law. In a divided Congress, changing the law has found advocates on both sides of the aisle. But until any revisions become law, thousands of American companies like Express Fasteners will be subject not only to new tariffs but to endless and ever-changing rules on how they apply.
The post Trump’s ‘national security’ tariffs are a big government mess appeared first on Washington Post.
