US appeals court rules most of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs illegal – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• A federal appeals court ruled that most of Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal, but can stay in effect until 14 October, to give time for a supreme court appeal.

• Trump suggested that the court decision, which affirmed a lower court ruling in May, could spell the end of the United States of America, but added that he expects the supreme court to help him win.

• Charles Borges, chief data officer of the Social Security Administration, resigned after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging that more than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk by staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, who uploaded sensitive information to an insecure cloud server.

• In 2014, Jim O’Neill, the former biotech investor and current deputy health secretary who was named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, suggested that the FDA should just let people use drugs before doing any research to show that they work.

• The Missouri governor, Mike Kehoe, has moved to help the Republican party gain an additional seat in Congress, calling a special legislative session to redraw congressional districts in his state.

• The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, fired two dozen “deep-state” employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s information technology department, including its top leaders, following what she called an unspecified “breach” of its network by a “threat actor”.

• A federal appeals court in San Francisco blocked Noem from moving ahead with her plan to strip temporary protected status from 600,000 Venezuelans who have permission to live and work in the United States amid turmoil in their homeland.

Charles Borges, chief data officer of the Social Security Administration, resigned on Friday due to what he called the agency’s actions against him since he filed a whistleblower complaint this week.

In his complaint, Borges alleged that more than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk by staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” who uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight.

“I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable,” Borges wrote in his resignation letter.

The Project Government Accountability Office, which is representing him in his whistleblower case, posted the letter on its website.

Borges’ attorney said he “no longer felt that he could continue to work for the Social Security Administration in good conscience, given what he had witnessed.” It added that he would continue to work with the proper oversight bodies.

Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old software engineer, was among the Doge officials named by Borges as part of the project to duplicate Americans’ Social Security data and put it on an insecure server.

It was Coristine’s recent beating, by two 15-year-olds on a Washington DC street, that Donald Trump used as a pretext for his federal takeover of the capital’s policing.

Jim O’Neill, the former biotech investor and current deputy health secretary who was named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, might lack any experience in health care, but he does have a lot of opinions about the regulation of medicine as a business that could soon be very important.

In 2014, when O’Neill was managing director of Mithril Capital Management, a “family of long-term venture capital funds” founded by Peter Thiel, he represented Thiel on the board of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to finding treatments for aging, with Thiel’s financial support.

That year, when O’Neill gave a talk at at the foundation’s “rejuvenation biotechnology” conference, he argued that development of drugs that might slow or reverse human aging was slowed down by the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to ensure that drugs are safe and effective.

Instead of making sure that drugs work before approving their use by the public, O’Neill said, the FDA should adopt of a system its proponents call “progressive approval”.

“We should reform FDA, so that it is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety and let people start using them, at their own risk, but not much risk of safety”, O’Neill said. “But let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized”.

O’Neill, who was standing in front of a slide on how much less efficient biotech startups were than software startups, taken from a book by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, got a round of applause for the observation.

As Jessica Hamzelou reported in the MIT Technology Review in June, O’Neill was suggesting that drugs be made available to the public “after the very first stage of clinical testing, which is designed to test whether a new treatment is safe. These tests are typically small and don’t reveal whether the drug actually works.”

That idea is popular though in the longevity community that O’Neill’s patron Thiel is at the center of.

It has also been proposed by O’Neill’s current boss, Robert F Kennedy Jr. In May, Kennedy told a longevity podcaster that he wanted to make it easier for people to experiment with treatments that might, or might not, work. “If you want to take an experimental drug … you ought to be able to do that”, Kennedy said.

But ditching FDA’s gold-standard of phase 2 and phase 3 trials strikes others as unethical. “It’s just absurd to think that the regulatory agency that’s responsible for making sure that products are safe and effective before they’re made available to patients couldn’t protect patients from charlatans: Holly Fernandez Lynch, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told MIT Technology Review. “It’s just like a complete dereliction of duty.”

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, mocked Donald Trump, the Nobel prize-wanting president, for his hyperbolic claim, after a court ruled that his tariffs are almost all illegal, that “this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America” unless it is overturned.

“Yep, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” Krugman wrote on Substack. “Take away these tariffs, and the county will revert to the blasted wasteland it was on … April 1, just before Trump made his big tariff announcement.”

Krugman added:

It’s important to be clear what just happened. The court didn’t say that tariffs per se are illegal. It said that the procedure Trump used to impose tariffs — declaring an economic emergency, then setting tariff rates without so much as consulting Congress, let alone passing legislation — is illegal. If Trump wants to pass a tariff bill, the same way he passed his One Big Beautiful Bill, OK. (I mean, terrible policy, but legal.)

But just saying “I am the Tariff Man, and here are my tariffs” isn’t OK.

True, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act gives the president substantial room to set tariffs during an, um, economic emergency. But Trump himself keeps saying that the economy is in wonderful shape, booming without inflation, and any claims to the contrary are fake news. So how can things both be terrific and an emergency calling for drastic action?

Donald Trump has said his tariffs are about winning. But in response to his appeals court setback on Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom declared: “Trump is America’s biggest loser.”

Newsom and the state’s attorney general Rob Bonta have filed a separate lawsuit against Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, which similarly argues the president lacks the authority to unilaterally impose levies through the IEEPA. That suit alleges that Trump’s global trade war has caused “immediate and irreparable harm” to the state – the world’s fourth largest economy.

“And while Trump might be America’s biggest loser, it’s everyday Americans who are paying the price for his failed economic policies,” Newsom said.

The Missouri governor, Mike Kehoe, has moved to help the Republican party gain an additional seat in Congress, calling a special legislative session to redraw congressional districts in his state.

Kehoe’s announcement on Friday followed a pressure campaign from Donald Trump, who has urged Republican states to reshape district boundaries to more heavily favor Republicans, boosting the party’s chances of maintaining control of the House of Representatives in 2026, despite the unpopularity of his policies.

The announcement came hours after Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed into law a new congressional map designed to help Republicans gain five more House seats in next year’s elections without winning more votes.

Trump has also pushed Indiana lawmakers to redraw that state’s maps, and has also pushed lawmakers in Florida and Ohio to help add three or more Republican-leaning seats.

Trump celebrated what he called the prospect of “a new, much fairer, and much improved, Congressional Map, that will give the incredible people of Missouri the tremendous opportunity to elect an additional MAGA Republican in the 2026 Midterm Elections”.

Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver, whose district, which includes part of Kansas City, might be redrawn to make his re-election unlikely, denounced the proposed new map as much less fair.

“This attempt to gerrymander Missouri will not simply change district lines, it will silence voices. It will deny representation. It will tell the people of Missouri that their lawmakers no longer wish to earn their vote, that elections are predetermined by the power brokers in Washington,” Cleaver said in a statement.

“Roughly 40% of Missourians cast their ballots for Democratic candidates last year, and they deserve representation in the People’s House just as much as our Republican neighbors.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) pointed to a proposal to create a new Republican majority seat by splitting heavily Democratic Kansas City.

“Republicans are running scared, and they’ve decided their only hope for maintaining their majority is to pursue a cynical, unpopular scheme to gerrymander congressional maps,” Suzan DelBene, a Washington congresswoman who chairs the DCCC said.

“The Missouri constitution, business and community leaders, and common sense all support the idea of Kansas City remaining one, compact congressional district. Donald Trump and DC Republicans’ desire to hold on to power are the only rationale for this re-draw.”

The Liberty Justice Center, which filed a lawsuit in April to challenge Donald Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs on behalf of five small businesses that would be damaged by the tariffs, issued a statement to celebrate what it called its second major victory in the case.

The lawsuit was filed with the constitutional scholar Ilya Somin and joined by other lawyers, including Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general of the United States during the Obama administration, after Trump administration appealed against his initial loss in the US court of international trade.

“For the second time in this case, a federal court has held that the President’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs are unlawful,” Jeffrey Schwab, director of litigation for the not-for-profit legal center said. “The President cannot lawfully impose tariffs on his own; and IEEPA does not give him unlimited unilateral tariff authority. This decision protects American businesses and consumers from the uncertainty and harm caused by these unlawful tariffs.”

“The decision today is a powerful reaffirmation of our nation’s core constitutional commitments from our nation’s founders, especially the principle that presidents must act within the rule of law,” Katyal said. “It is that commitment to the rule of law that brought my parents, and millions of others, to this country, and which stands as a beacon of freedom and hope around the globe.”

In an interview with MSNBC later on Friday, Katyal pointed out that Trump appeared to acknowledge during his first term that the constitution gave the power to impose tariffs to Congress. “He went and asked Congress for the authority to tariff and they said no. So President Trump this time around just did it on his own”, Katyal said.

The US court of appeals for the federal circuit, which ruled on Friday that most of Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal, will allow the import taxes to stay in effect until 14 October, to give the president time to appeal to the supreme court.

After ruling, 7-4, that the so-called “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by Trump are not legal, the court paused its order until that date.

Donald Trump broke his uncharacteristic silence on the news in recent days by posting an outraged reaction to the federal appeals court ruling that most of his tariffs are illegal.

The president’s post, which was shared on an official White House account, began with the all-caps declaration: “ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT!”

The court ruling against Trump did say that the tariffs can remain in place until 14 October, giving his administration time to appeal to the supreme court.

“Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end,” Trump added in his response.

The president was quite clear about what he sees as the vehicle for bringing about his preferred end, being granted the power to impose taxes reserved in the US constitution for Congress.

“For many years, Tariffs were allowed to be used against us by our uncaring and unwise Politicians,” Trump wrote. “Now, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, we will use them to the benefit of our Nation.”

Donald Trump overstepped his presidential powers with most of his globe-rattling tariff policies, a federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday.

US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”, the court said.

The court’s decision will likely mean that the supreme court will have to rule on whether Trump has the legal right as president to upend US trade policy. The court also said the ruling wouldn’t take effect until 14 October.

Trump has claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.

The Trump administration has and cited various national emergencies – including US trade deficits with trading partners, fentanyl trafficking and immigration – as the reasons for the actions.

But a group of small businesses have challenged the administration’s arguments, arguing they are “devastating small businesses across the country.”

And on Friday, the appellate court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”

A US appeals court ruled on Friday that most of Donald Trump’s new tariffs are illegal, upholding a ruling from the federal court of international trade that the president’s declaration of an economic emergency to justify sweeping tariffs violates a 1977 law and the US constitution, which reserves taxation for the Congress.

As our colleague Dominic Rushe explains, the New York-based US court of international trade previously ruled against Trump’s tariff policies in May, saying the president had exceeded his authority when he imposed both sets of challenged tariffs. The three-judge panel included a judge who was appointed by Trump in his first term.

The split decision from the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC addressed the legality of what Trump calls “reciprocal” tariffs imposed as part of his trade war in April, as well as a separate set of tariffs imposed in February against China, Canada and Mexico.

The court ruled that the president does have the legal authority to impose narrow, sectoral tariffs, like those on steel and aluminum imports, but he far exceeded his power with the global tariffs on imports he first declared in April.

The case, which is expected to be appealed to the US supreme court, hinges of Trump’s broad interpretation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

That law gives the president the power to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during national emergencies, which previous presidents haver used to sanction enemies or freeze their assets.

Trump, the first president to use IEEPA to impose tariffs, has claimed the import taxes were justified given trade imbalances, declining US manufacturing power and the cross-border flow of drugs.

The law does not mention tariffs, although it allows the president to take a wide range of actions in response to a crisis. Trump’s justice department has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorize a president to “regulate” imports or block them completely.

In ruling against Trump’s interpretation of the law, the court’s majority writes: “we discern no clear congressional authorization by IEEPA for tariffs of the magnitude of the Reciprocal Tariffs and Trafficking Tariffs. Reading the phrase ‘regulate … importation’ to include imposing these tariffs is ‘a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.’”

In one of the opinions upholding the lower court’s finding that Trump exceeded his authority, the judges write: “Under the Government’s view, the President could make such a factual finding by merely pointing to a lack of taxes paid on imports from outside the country. But if the President can declare an emergency to cut the deficit by raising taxes in whatever way he wishes, not much remains of Congressional authority over taxation.”

The appeals court ruled on two cases, one brought by five small businesses and the other by 12 Democratic-led US states, which argued that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs.

The US constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to issue taxes and tariffs, and any delegation of that authority must be both explicit and limited, according to the lawsuits.

Another court in Washington DC ruled that IEEPA does not authorize Trump’s tariffs, and the government has appealed that decision as well. At least eight lawsuits have challenged Trump’s tariff policies, including one filed by the state of California.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, fired two dozen “deep-state” employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s information technology department on Friday, including its top leaders, following what she called an unspecified “breach” of its network by a “threat actor”.

“While conducting a routine cybersecurity review, the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) discovered significant security vulnerabilities that gave a threat actor access to FEMA’s network”, the homeland security department said in a statement. “The investigation uncovered several severe lapses in security that allowed the threat actor to breach FEMA’s network and threaten the entire Department and the nation as a whole.”

The statement said that Fema’s chief information officer, Charlie Armstrong, chief information security officer, Greg Edwards, and 22 other IT employees “directly responsible” were fired.

“FEMA’s career IT leadership failed on every level. Their incompetence put the American people at risk”, Noem said. “When DHS stepped in to fix the problem, entrenched bureaucrats worked to prevent us from solving the problem and downplayed just how bad this breach was. These deep-state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens’ personal data, so I terminated them immediately.”

The firings came minutes after the department released a long statement attacking the federal emergency management agency that Donald Trump is pushing to close. “FEMA has failed Americans for decades”, the department’s official X account posted at the start of a thread deriding the agency, in which is claimed that “the Biden administration hijacked FEMA to resettle illegal aliens”.