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Tag: national emergency

  • What to know about the Supreme Court arguments over Trump’s tariffs

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    Three lower courts have ruled President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose worldwide tariffs to be illegal. Now the Supreme Court, with three justices Trump appointed and generally favorable to muscular presidential power, will have the final word.In roughly two dozen emergency appeals, the justices have largely gone along with Trump in temporarily allowing parts of his aggressive second-term agenda to take effect while lawsuits play out.But the case being argued Wednesday is the first in which the court will render a final decision on a Trump policy. The stakes are enormous, both politically and financially.The Republican president has made tariffs a central piece of his economic and foreign policy and has said it would be a “disaster” if the Supreme Court rules against him.Here are some things to know about the tariffs arguments at the Supreme Court:Tariffs are taxes on importsThey are paid by companies that import finished products or parts, and the added cost can be passed on to consumers.Through September, the government has reported collecting $195 billion in revenue generated from the tariffs.The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.In February, he invoked the law to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, saying that the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the U.S. border amounted to a national emergency and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.In April, he imposed worldwide tariffs after declaring the United States’ longstanding trade deficits “a national emergency.”Libertarian-backed businesses and states challenged the tariffs in federal courtChallengers to Trump’s actions won rulings from a specialized trade court, a district judge in Washington and a business-focused appeals court, also in the nation’s capital.Those courts found that Trump could not justify tariffs under the emergency powers law, which doesn’t mention them. But they left the tariffs in place in the meantime.The appeals court relied on major questions, a legal doctrine devised by the Supreme Court that requires Congress to speak clearly on issues of “vast economic and political significance.”The major questions doctrine doomed several Biden policiesConservative majorities struck down three of then-President Joe Biden’s initiatives related to the coronavirus pandemic. The court ended the Democrat’s pause on evictions, blocked a vaccine mandate for large businesses and prevented student loan forgiveness that would have totaled $500 billion over 10 years.In comparison, the stakes in the tariff case are much higher. The taxes are estimated to generate $3 trillion over 10 years.The challengers in the tariffs case have cited writings by the three Trump appointees, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in calling on the court to apply similar limitations on a signal Trump policy.Barrett described a babysitter taking children on roller coasters and spending a night in a hotel based on a parent’s encouragement to “make sure the kids have fun.”“In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park,” Barrett wrote in the student loans case. “If a parent were willing to greenlight a trip that big, we would expect much more clarity than a general instruction to ‘make sure the kids have fun.’”Kavanaugh, though, has suggested the court should not apply the same limiting standard to foreign policy and national security issues.A dissenting appellate judge also wrote that Congress purposely gave presidents more latitude to act through the emergency powers law.Some of the businesses that sued also are raising a separate legal argument in an appeal to conservative justices, saying that Congress could not constitutionally delegate its taxing power to the president.The nondelegation principle has not been used in 90 years, since the Supreme Court struck down some New Deal legislation.But Gorsuch authored a dissent in June that would have found the Federal Communications Commission’s universal service fee an unconstitutional delegation. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.“What happens when Congress, weary of the hard business of legislating and facing strong incentives to pass the buck, cedes its lawmaking power, clearly and unmistakably, to an executive that craves it?” Gorsuch wrote.The justices could act more quickly than usual in issuing a decisionThe court only agreed to hear the case in September, scheduling arguments less than two months later. The quick turnaround, at least by Supreme Court standards, suggests that the court will try to act fast.High-profile cases can take half a year or more to resolve, often because the majority and dissenting opinions go through rounds of revision.But the court can act quickly when deadline pressure dictates. Most recently, the court ruled a week after hearing arguments in the TikTok case, unanimously upholding a law requiring the popular social media app to be banned unless it was sold by its Chinese parent company. Trump has intervened several times to keep the law from taking effect while negotiations continue with China.

    WASHINGTON —

    Three lower courts have ruled President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose worldwide tariffs to be illegal. Now the Supreme Court, with three justices Trump appointed and generally favorable to muscular presidential power, will have the final word.

    In roughly two dozen emergency appeals, the justices have largely gone along with Trump in temporarily allowing parts of his aggressive second-term agenda to take effect while lawsuits play out.

    But the case being argued Wednesday is the first in which the court will render a final decision on a Trump policy. The stakes are enormous, both politically and financially.

    The Republican president has made tariffs a central piece of his economic and foreign policy and has said it would be a “disaster” if the Supreme Court rules against him.

    Here are some things to know about the tariffs arguments at the Supreme Court:

    Tariffs are taxes on imports

    They are paid by companies that import finished products or parts, and the added cost can be passed on to consumers.

    Through September, the government has reported collecting $195 billion in revenue generated from the tariffs.

    The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    In February, he invoked the law to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, saying that the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the U.S. border amounted to a national emergency and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.

    In April, he imposed worldwide tariffs after declaring the United States’ longstanding trade deficits “a national emergency.”

    Libertarian-backed businesses and states challenged the tariffs in federal court

    Challengers to Trump’s actions won rulings from a specialized trade court, a district judge in Washington and a business-focused appeals court, also in the nation’s capital.

    Those courts found that Trump could not justify tariffs under the emergency powers law, which doesn’t mention them. But they left the tariffs in place in the meantime.

    The appeals court relied on major questions, a legal doctrine devised by the Supreme Court that requires Congress to speak clearly on issues of “vast economic and political significance.”

    The major questions doctrine doomed several Biden policies

    Conservative majorities struck down three of then-President Joe Biden’s initiatives related to the coronavirus pandemic. The court ended the Democrat’s pause on evictions, blocked a vaccine mandate for large businesses and prevented student loan forgiveness that would have totaled $500 billion over 10 years.

    In comparison, the stakes in the tariff case are much higher. The taxes are estimated to generate $3 trillion over 10 years.

    The challengers in the tariffs case have cited writings by the three Trump appointees, Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in calling on the court to apply similar limitations on a signal Trump policy.

    Barrett described a babysitter taking children on roller coasters and spending a night in a hotel based on a parent’s encouragement to “make sure the kids have fun.”

    “In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park,” Barrett wrote in the student loans case. “If a parent were willing to greenlight a trip that big, we would expect much more clarity than a general instruction to ‘make sure the kids have fun.’”

    Kavanaugh, though, has suggested the court should not apply the same limiting standard to foreign policy and national security issues.

    A dissenting appellate judge also wrote that Congress purposely gave presidents more latitude to act through the emergency powers law.

    Some of the businesses that sued also are raising a separate legal argument in an appeal to conservative justices, saying that Congress could not constitutionally delegate its taxing power to the president.

    The nondelegation principle has not been used in 90 years, since the Supreme Court struck down some New Deal legislation.

    But Gorsuch authored a dissent in June that would have found the Federal Communications Commission’s universal service fee an unconstitutional delegation. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.

    “What happens when Congress, weary of the hard business of legislating and facing strong incentives to pass the buck, cedes its lawmaking power, clearly and unmistakably, to an executive that craves it?” Gorsuch wrote.

    The justices could act more quickly than usual in issuing a decision

    The court only agreed to hear the case in September, scheduling arguments less than two months later. The quick turnaround, at least by Supreme Court standards, suggests that the court will try to act fast.

    High-profile cases can take half a year or more to resolve, often because the majority and dissenting opinions go through rounds of revision.

    But the court can act quickly when deadline pressure dictates. Most recently, the court ruled a week after hearing arguments in the TikTok case, unanimously upholding a law requiring the popular social media app to be banned unless it was sold by its Chinese parent company. Trump has intervened several times to keep the law from taking effect while negotiations continue with China.

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  • Only the Emergency Has Ended

    Only the Emergency Has Ended

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    Emergency responses—being, well, emergency responses—aren’t designed to last forever, and this morning, the World Health Organization declared the one that’s been in place for the COVID-19 pandemic since January 2020 officially done. “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said at a press conference; although the coronavirus will continue to pose a threat, the time had simply come, he and his colleagues said, for countries to move away from treating it as a global crisis.

    And, really, they already have: The United States, for instance, ended its national emergency last month and will sunset its public-health emergency next week; countries around the world have long since shelved testing programs, lifted lockdowns, dispensed with masking mandates, and even stopped recommending frequent COVID shots to healthy people in certain age groups. In some ways, the WHO was already a straggler. Had it waited much longer, the power of its designation of COVID as a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, “would have been undermined,” says Salim Abdool Karim, the director of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa.

    There’s no disputing that the virus’s threat has ebbed since the pandemic’s worst days. By and large, “we are in our recovery phase now”—not perfectly stabilized, but no longer in chaotic flux, says René Najera, the director of public health at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Still, ending the emergency doesn’t mean that the world has fully addressed the problems that made this an emergency. Global vaccine distribution remains wildly inequitable, leaving many people susceptible to the virus’s worst effects; deaths are still concentrated among those most vulnerable; the virus’s evolutionary and transmission patterns are far from predictable or seasonal. Now, ending the emergency is less an epidemiological decision than a political one: Our tolerance for these dangers has grown to the extent that most people are doing their best to look away from the remaining risk, and will continue to until the virus forces us to turn back.

    The end to the PHEIC, to be clear, isn’t a declaration that COVID is over—or even that the pandemic is. Both a PHEIC and a pandemic tend to involve the rapid and international spread of a dangerous disease, and the two typically do go hand in hand. But no set-in-stone rules delineate when either starts or ends. Plenty of diseases have met pandemic criteria—noted by many epidemiologists as an epidemic that’s rapidly spread to several continents—without ever being granted a PHEIC, as is the case with HIV. And several PHEICs, including two of the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade and the Zika epidemic that began in 2015, did not consistently earn the pan- prefix among experts. With COVID, the WHO called a PHEIC more than a month before it publicly labeled the outbreak a pandemic on March 11. Now the organization has bookended its declaration with a similar mismatch: one crisis designation on and the other off. That once again leaves the world in a bizarre risk limbo, with the threat everywhere but our concern for it on the wane.

    For other diseases with pandemic potential, understanding the start and end of crisis has been simpler. After a new strain of H1N1 influenza sparked a global outbreak in 2009, disrupting the disease’s normal seasonal ebb and flow, scientists simply waited until the virus’s annual transmission patterns went back to their pre-outbreak baseline, then declared that particular pandemic done. But “we don’t really have a baseline” to return to for SARS-CoV-2, says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. This has left officials floundering for an end-of-pandemic threshold to meet. Once, envisioning that coda seemed more possible: In February 2021, when the COVID shots were still new, Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic that, in the U.S. at least, pandemic restrictions might end once the country reached some relatively high rate of vaccination, or drove daily deaths below 100—approximating the low-ish end of the flu’s annual toll.

    Those criteria aren’t perfect. Given how the virus has evolved, even, say, an 85 percent vaccination rate probably wouldn’t have squelched the virus in a way public-health experts were envisioning in 2021 (and wouldn’t have absolved us of booster maintenance). And even if the death toll slipped below 100 deaths a day, the virus’s chronic effects would still pose an immense threat. But thresholds such as those, flawed though they were, were never even set. “I’m not sure we ever set any goals at all” to designate when we’d have the virus beat, Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at NYU and an editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told me. And if they had been, we probably still would not have met them: Two years out, we certainly have not.

    Instead, efforts to mitigate the virus have only gotten laxer. Most individuals are no longer masking, testing, or staying up to date on their shots; on community scales, the public goods that once seemed essential—ventilation, sick leave, equitable access to insurance and health care—have already faded from most discourse. That COVID has been more muted in recent months feels “more like luck” than a product of concerted muffling from us, Scarpino told me. Should another SARS-CoV-2 variant sweep the world or develop resistance to Paxlovid, “we don’t have much in the way of a plan,” he said.

    If and when the virus troubles us again, our lack of preparedness will be a reflection of America’s classically reactive approach to public health. Even amid a years-long emergency declaration that spanned national and international scales, we squandered the opportunity “to make the system more resilient to the next crisis,” Gounder said. There is little foresight for what might come next. And individuals are still largely being asked to fend for themselves—which means that as this emergency declaration ends, we are setting ourselves up for another to inevitably come, and hit us just as hard.

    As the final roadblocks to declaring normalcy disappear, we’re unlikely to patch those gaps. The PHEIC, at this point, was more symbolic than practical—but that didn’t make it inconsequential. Experts worry that its end will sap what remaining incentive there was for some countries to sustain a COVID-focused response—one that would, say, keep vaccines, treatments, and tests in the hands of those who need them most. “Public interest is very binary—it’s either an emergency or it’s not,” says Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. With the PHEIC now gone, the world has officially toggled itself to “not.” But there’s no going back to 2019. Between that and the height of the pandemic is middle-ground maintenance, a level of concern and response that the world has still not managed to properly calibrate.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • The Future of Monkeypox

    The Future of Monkeypox

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    The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has already been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.

    About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those orders to expire; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

    But “endgame” doesn’t mean “over”—and mpox will be with us for the foreseeable future. The U.S. outbreak is only now showing us its long and ugly tail: 15 daily cases is not zero daily cases; even as the number of new infections declines, inequities are growing. Black and Latino people make up a majority of new mpox cases and are contracting the disease at three to five times the rate of white Americans, but they have received proportionately fewer vaccines. “Now it’s truly the folks who are the most marginalized that we’re seeing,” says Ofole Mgbako, a physician and population-health researcher at New York University. “Which is also why, of course, it’s fallen out of the news.” If the virus sticks around (as it very likely could), and if the disparities persist (as they almost certainly will), then mpox could end up saddling thousands of vulnerable Americans each year with yet another debilitating, stigmatized, and neglected disease.

    Read: America should have been able to handle monkeypox

    At this point, there’s not even any guarantee that this case downturn will persist. “I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods,” says Sara Bares, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. Immunity, acquired through infection or vaccines, is now concentrated among those at highest risk, says Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. But researchers still don’t know how well those defenses can stave off another infection, or how long they might last—gaps in knowledge that may be tough to fill, now that incidence is so low. And although months of advocacy and outreach from the LGBTQ community have cut down on risky sexual activities, many cautionary trends will eventually reset to their pre-outbreak norm. “We know extensively from other sexually transmissible infections that behavior change is not usually the most sustained response,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University.

    At the same time, this year’s mpox outbreaks are stranger and more unwieldy than those that came before. A ballooning body of evidence suggests that people can become infectious before they develop symptoms, contrary to prior understanding; some physicians are concerned that patients, especially those who are immunocompromised, might remain infectious after the brunt of visible illness resolves, says Philip Ponce, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the medical director of San Antonio’s Kind Clinic. (Some 40 percent of Americans who have been diagnosed with mpox are living with HIV.) Researchers still don’t have a good grip on which bodily fluids and types of contact may be riskiest over the trajectory of a sickness. Cases are still being missed by primary-care providers who remain unfamiliar with the ins and outs of diagnosis and testing, especially in people with darker skin. And although this epidemic has, for the most part, continued to affect men who have sex with men, women and nonbinary people are getting sick as well, to an underappreciated degree.

    Read: What should worry most Americans about our monkeypox response

    Intel on the only mpox-fighting antiviral on the shelf, a smallpox drug called tecovirimat, also remains concerningly scant, even as experts worry that the virus could develop resistance. The treatment has been given a conditional greenlight for use in people who are currently, or at risk of becoming, severely sick. Anecdotally, it seems to work wonders, shaving days or weeks off the painful, debilitating course of symptoms that can send infected people into long-term isolation. But experts still lack rigorous data in humans to confirm just how well it works, Bares, who’s among the scientists involved in a nationwide study of the antiviral, told me. And although clinical trials for tecovirimat are under way, she added, in the U.S., they’re “struggling to enroll patients” now that infections have plummeted to such a sustained low. It’s a numerical problem as well as a sociocultural one. “The urgency with which people answer questions declines as case counts go down,” Varma told me.

    Recent CDC reports show that a growing proportion of new infections aren’t being reported with a known sexual-contact history, stymieing efforts at contact tracing. That might in part be a product of the outbreak’s gradual migration from liberal, well-off urban centers, hit early on in the epidemic, to more communities in the South and Southwest. “In small towns, the risk of disclosure is high,” Bares told me. In seeking care or vaccination, “you’re outing yourself.” When mpox cases in Nebraska took an unexpected nosedive earlier this fall, “a colleague and I asked one another, ‘Do you think patients are afraid to come in?’” Those concerns can be especially high in certain communities of color, Ponce told me. San Antonio’s Latino population, for instance, “tends to be much more conservative; there’s much more stigma associated with one being LGBT at all, let alone being LGBT and trying to access biomedical interventions.”

    Hidden infections can become fast-spreading ones. Monitoring an infectious disease is far easier when the people most at risk have insurance coverage and access to savvy clinicians, and when they are inclined to trust public-health institutions. “That’s predominantly white people,” says Ace Robinson, the CEO of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation, in Washington. Now that the mpox outbreak is moving out of that population into less privileged ones, Robinson fears “a massive undercount” of cases.

    Americans who are catching the virus during the outbreak’s denouement are paying a price. The means to fight mpox are likely to dwindle, even as the virus entrenches itself in the population most in need of those tools. One concern remains the country’s vaccination strategy, which underwent a mid-outbreak shift: To address limited shot supply, the FDA authorized a new dosing method with limited evidence behind it—a decision that primarily affected people near the back of the inoculation line. The method is safe but tricky to administer, and it can have tough side effects: Some of Titanji’s patients have experienced swelling near their injection site that lasted for weeks after their first dose, and now “they just don’t want to get another shot.”

    The continued shift of mpox into minority populations, Robinson told me, is also further sapping public attention: “As long as this is centered in BIPOC communities, there’s going to be less of a push.” Public interest in this crisis was modest even at its highest point, says Steven Klemow, an infectious-disease physician at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and the medical director of Dallas’s Kind Clinic. Now experts are watching that cycle of neglect reinforce itself as the outbreak continues to affect and compress into marginalized communities, including those that have for decades borne a disproportionate share of the burden of sexually associated infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV. “These are not the groups that necessarily get people jumping on their feet,” Titanji told me.

    Some of the people most at risk are moving on as well, Robinson told me. In his community in Washington, he was disappointed to see high rates of vaccine refusal at two recent outreach events serving the region’s Black and American Indian populations. “They had no knowledge of the virus,” he told me. Titanji has seen similar trends in her community in Georgia. “There’s some sense of complacency, like, ‘It’s no longer an issue, so why do I need to get vaccinated?’” she said.

    Read: America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle

    The tide seems unlikely to shift. Even tens of thousands of cases deep into the American outbreak, sexual-health clinics—which have been on the front lines of the mpox response—remain short on funds and staff. Although the influx of cases has slowed, Ponce and Klemow are still treating multiple mpox patients a week while trying to keep up the services they typically offer—at a time when STI rates are on a years-long rise. “We’re really assuming that this is going to become another sexually associated disease that is going to be a part of our wheelhouse that we’ll have to manage for the indefinite future,” Klemow told me. “We’ve had to pull resources away from our other services that we provide.” The problem could yet worsen if the national emergency declared in August is allowed to expire, which would likely curb the availability of antivirals and vaccines.

    Rivers still holds out hope for eliminating mpox in the U.S. But getting from low to zero isn’t as easy as it might seem. This current stretch of decline could unspool for years, even decades, especially if the virus finds a new animal host. “We’ve seen this story play out so many times before,” Varma told me. Efforts to eliminate syphilis from the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, for instance, gained traction for a while—then petered out during what could have been their final stretch. It’s the classic boom-bust cycle to which the country is so prone: As case rates fall, so does interest in pushing them further down.

    Our memories of public-health crises never seem to linger for long. At the start of this mpox outbreak, Titanji told me, there was an opportunity to shore up our systems and buffer ourselves against future epidemics, both imported and homegrown. The country squandered it and failed to send aid abroad. If another surge of mpox cases arrives, as it very likely could, she said, “we will again be going back to the drawing board.”

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    Katherine J. Wu

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