Overview

What the Administration Calls an Emergency

President Trump declared nine new national emergencies in the first year of his second term, using executive authority to fast-track policies on energy, trade, immigration, drug enforcement, and foreign relations. Combined with two emergency declarations still in effect from his first term, Trump became responsible for eleven of the forty-eight national emergencies currently active in the United States. The breadth of subject matter is notable: a single day — January 20, 2025 — produced emergencies at the southern border, a national energy emergency, and an order designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Executive Order 14156, signed on January 20, 2025, declared a national energy emergency to address the nation's "inadequate energy supply and infrastructure," including concerns about military preparedness. Separately, the administration invoked IEEPA to address what it characterized as a national emergency posed by large and persistent trade deficits driven by the absence of reciprocity in U.S. trade relationships. In August 2025, the administration declared a crime emergency in the District of Columbia, deploying National Guard soldiers and reorienting local law enforcement under federal direction. The common feature across these declarations is that the administration characterized as emergency conditions what critics described as longstanding structural problems — energy dependence, border crossings, drug trafficking, and trade imbalances — rather than sudden, acute crises.

The Legal Powers an Emergency Unlocks

These declarations are part of a broader use of the National Emergencies Act, which allows presidents to unlock special powers in response to what they deem "unusual and extraordinary threats." The NEA itself confers no substantive powers; it activates dormant statutory authorities scattered throughout the U.S. Code. In practice, the most significant of those authorities in the Trump second term has been IEEPA, a 1977 statute.

The legal authority the administration relied upon to impose tariffs is IEEPA, a statute that becomes available when the president declares a national emergency under the NEA. IEEPA authorizes the president to act upon declaring a national emergency "to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States." In addition to IEEPA, border-related emergencies opened access to authorities allowing military deployment and the potential invocation of the Insurrection Act. The January 20, 2025, border proclamation directed the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense to submit a joint report recommending, among other things, whether the president should invoke the Insurrection Act to obtain complete operational control of the southern border.

Necessity, Evidence, and Executive Discretion

The NEA places virtually no evidentiary threshold on the president's determination that an emergency exists. The statute requires only that the president declare the emergency, specify the powers being invoked, and transmit the declaration to Congress. This design reflects a deliberate legislative choice made in 1976 to codify and rationalize emergency powers that had previously accumulated in an unstructured fashion. But it also means that the decision about whether conditions constitute an "unusual and extraordinary threat" rests almost entirely with the executive branch.

Until 2025, no president had invoked IEEPA as legal authority for imposing tariffs. The Brennan Center for Justice argued in litigation briefs that Congress enacted both the NEA and IEEPA to rein in the presidential use of emergency powers and to ensure they could not be used to displace non-emergency laws. The administration's position, by contrast, was that persistent trade deficits and drug trafficking constituted ongoing threats sufficient to meet the statutory threshold — conditions that had existed for years before the declaration and showed no sign of acute deterioration at the moment the emergencies were proclaimed. According to reporting relying on Brennan Center data, Trump declared more national emergency declarations than any other modern president during their first hundred days in office.

Congressional and Judicial Constraints

Congress possesses a formal mechanism to terminate national emergencies: either chamber can pass a joint resolution of termination under the NEA's expedited procedures. In practice, this check has proved largely inoperative. One joint resolution, S.J. Res. 10, would have terminated the national energy emergency declared in Executive Order 14156, but it failed to pass the Senate on February 26, 2025. With a Republican majority in both chambers, the administration faced little congressional resistance to its emergency declarations throughout 2025.

The courts have provided a more meaningful check, at least on the most expansive use of emergency authority. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled by a majority of six to three that IEEPA does not provide a legal basis for the Trump administration to impose sweeping tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the majority opinion, joined in full by Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, and joined in part by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The crux of the decision was that Congress did not delegate to the president the authority to impose tariffs in enacting IEEPA, with the Court emphasizing that Congress notably did not include "any mention of tariffs or duties" in the statute — in contrast to what it typically does in other tariff statutes.

The lack of historical precedent for using IEEPA to levy tariffs, coupled with the sweeping authority claimed, confirmed for the Court that tariffs fall outside IEEPA's intended scope. Separately, in the FEMA context, a federal court ruled in March 2026 that the administration's termination of a disaster prevention grant program was unlawful, and FEMA reinstated the program following that ruling. The judiciary has thus been willing to set boundaries, though it has done so case by case rather than through any general limitation on the emergency declaration framework itself.

Immediate Results and Long-Term Precedent

IEEPA tariffs had accounted for roughly 70 percent of the United States' total tariff architecture, and the Supreme Court ruling struck at the heart of the most powerful economic and foreign policy instrument the president had wielded since taking office. The Court did not clarify whether importers could obtain refunds for the estimated $175 billion in tariffs already paid. Following the ruling, while Trump ended various tariff actions based on IEEPA, he also issued a proclamation continuing his use of IEEPA to suspend the de minimis exemption — the provision generally allowing duty-free importation of up to $800 of merchandise per person per day. This suggests the administration views the ruling as a constraint on one specific application rather than a general retreat from emergency-based economic governance.

On the FEMA front, the administration's relationship with disaster response has been contested on different grounds. Trump signed an executive order establishing a FEMA Review Council to evaluate the agency, and subsequently continued its mandate through March 2026. A 2025 Wall Street Journal opinion article noted that the administration had considered reducing the role of FEMA as part of broader efforts to shrink the federal government — a posture that sits in structural tension with the administration's simultaneous use of emergency declarations to unlock federal resources in individual disaster responses.

The Test of Temporary Power

Emergency authority is premised on temporariness. The constitutional and statutory logic is that unusual conditions justify unusual measures, and that the powers will recede when the conditions do. The Trump second term has tested that premise in at least three observable ways: by declaring emergencies in domains where the underlying conditions are chronic rather than acute; by renewing declarations automatically rather than reassessing their basis; and by pivoting to alternative statutory authorities when one avenue is closed.

Since the National Emergencies Act's enactment in 1976, some ninety national emergencies have been declared — more than half of which are still in effect. That pattern predates the Trump administration and reflects a structural problem with the framework rather than a singular abuse: emergencies, once declared, acquire bureaucratic and political constituencies that make them difficult to terminate. What is more distinctive about the current period is the speed and range of initial declarations and the explicit connection between emergency powers and contested policy goals like trade rebalancing and immigration enforcement.

What is established is that the administration used emergency authority more broadly and in more policy domains than its recent predecessors in comparable time frames, and that at least one major use — IEEPA-based tariffs — was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. What remains disputed is whether the remaining active emergencies reflect genuine extraordinary conditions or whether they have become a durable feature of ordinary governance. And what has not yet been fully tested is how courts will evaluate the other emergency declarations — on energy, the border, and drug enforcement — if and when those are subjected to the same level of judicial scrutiny that ultimately constrained the tariff regime.