Why it's too early to celebrate. Here's what you can and can't expect from the decision, and what happens next.
By Leslie Meredith, Product & Editorial Director, Breakbulk Events & Media
Today's Supreme Court ruling is being called a major blow to the Trump administration's trade agenda. It may be. If you're claiming victory today, your celebration may be short-lived. For those of us covering the project industry, the story is more complicated than the headlines suggest, and understanding the scope and likely scenarios is what will actually help you plan.
What the Court Actually Did
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump exceeded his authority when he used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a 1977 emergency law, to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every country in the world. That law was written to let presidents freeze assets and impose sanctions during national emergencies. No president before Trump had ever used it to impose tariffs. The Court agreed he couldn't either.
That decision immediately voids roughly 60% of the tariffs put in place in 2025, including the "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariffs and duties tied to border security and drug trafficking declarations targeting Canada, Mexico and China.
What Stays in Place
The remaining 40% of tariffs are untouched, because they were imposed under different legal authorities that weren't part of this case. That includes the national security tariffs on steel and aluminum, currently running between 25% and 50%, which remain fully in force.
Those are the tariffs that have weighed most heavily on project development. When I surveyed ten senior industry leaders last July and asked them to rank the federal policies with the greatest impact on project work, steel and aluminum tariffs led by a wide margin. Because steel costs more, projects cost more. That reality did not change today.
For those sourcing heavy industrial equipment from Europe, such as transformers, generators and large machinery, the picture is more nuanced. The reciprocal tariffs on European goods were imposed under IEEPA, so today's ruling voids them. That could mean relief for project owners importing European equipment. But the EU Commission is already seeking clarity from the White House on what the ruling means for the broader EU-US trade deal struck last July, which was built on those same tariffs. That relationship is now unsettled in a new way.
And there is a catch regardless. The steel and aluminum content inside that European equipment (transformers are heavily steel and copper-intensive) remains subject to Section 232 tariffs, which the ruling did not touch. So even if the import duty on the finished piece of equipment drops, the upstream material costs driving its price have not moved. Add to that the new 10% global tariff Trump signed within hours of the ruling, and any relief on European sourcing may be partial and short-lived.
More Uncertainty, Not Less
The administration was prepared for this ruling and has already moved. Within hours of the decision, President Trump announced a new 10% global tariff under a different legal authority, one that allows fast action but caps tariffs at 150 days. Longer-term measures are also in motion, through trade statutes that require more process but carry no expiration date. The instrument changed. The direction did not.
That is worth keeping in mind as the project cargo industry reads today's news. A senior EPC executive on a panel at Breakbulk Europe 2025 captured the prevailing mood of the time when he said: "301 and other tariffs have a huge impact, but nobody really knows what the answer is yet." The ruling shifts some legal ground, but it doesn't resolve that fundamental uncertainty.
In fact, it may deepen it. Participants in our Future Thinkers survey, conducted ahead of the Breakbulk Middle East regional meeting, were already leaning that direction. When asked whether uncertainty around new project development had increased, decreased or stayed the same compared with last spring, 38.5% said more uncertainty versus only 15.4% who said less, a net tilt of more than 23 percentage points toward greater uncertainty even before today's decision.
The Refund Question
Companies that paid IEEPA tariffs, estimated at more than $142 billion, may technically be entitled to refunds. The Court, however, said nothing about how or whether that should happen, leaving it to lower courts to resolve. Trade attorneys are already warning the process will be slow, complicated and far from guaranteed. The administration has signaled it will fight refunds. And for procurement teams that absorbed those costs into bids and contracts months ago, recovering them may be practically impossible even if courts eventually rule refunds are owed.
The Bottom Line
This ruling changes the legal landscape without changing the operating reality. The project industry needs stable, predictable costs to move work from planning to commitment. That environment doesn't exist today, and today's ruling doesn't create it. New tariff actions are already coming under different authority. Steel costs remain elevated. And the word that defined sentiment in this industry a year ago still applies: uncertainty.