How to plan buying, selling and shipping after new court ruling on Trump tariffs
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Recruitment, development, career transition. LHH, a beautiful working world. Discover recruitment solutions at LHH.com slash beautiful. How to plan buying, selling and shipping now that a court has ruled President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs are illegal.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York. As you've been hearing, a federal court dedicated to matters of trade has struck down President Trump's big package of tariffs announced with fanfare in early April. The administration used emergency powers for this round of import taxes, something the court says do not apply here. The Trump administration says it is not for unelected judges to decide. For businesses and consumers, the uncertainty continues. Marketplace's Henry Epp joins me now with what this blocks and doesn't block. Henry?

Yeah, this ruling blocks many but not all of the tariffs that Trump has imposed in the last few months. All those country-specific tariffs we've been talking about since early April, those are struck down by this ruling. So the Liberation Day import taxes Trump listed on a big board and then dropped to 10% and then threatened to raise against the EU last week, that's what the court is blocking. Also, the across-the-board tariffs Trump slapped on Canada and Mexico earlier in this year –

The court said they can't go forward either. But other tariffs on specific goods like cars and steel and aluminum, those are not affected by this ruling. So they stay in place. As a practical matter, what does this mean for goods at the border? Do we still pay the tariffs?

Well, so this is the question that importers and businesses are trying to sort out right now. And at the moment, there is not a clear answer. The administration has 10 days to comply with this order, and businesses may be in line for refunds for tariffs they've already paid if the ruling holds. But the White House criticized the ruling and plans to appeal, and the case could eventually make it to the Supreme Court. There's a lot of talk about the ruling.

There's also another way for the president to impose tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has a significant trade deficit. And the ruling mentions this. It allows the president to set 15 percent import taxes on specific countries for up to 150 days. So we could see the administration try to find other justifications for tariffs. But what's clear right now is markets are happy with the ruling. Stock futures are trading higher this morning.

All right. They are up, but not wildly. I'm looking at S&P futures up 1.2 percent. Dow futures up six tenths of one percent. Nasdaq futures, let's see, up 1.7 percent.

Elon Musk is stepping down from his role at the government cost and personnel cutting group Doge. Activist investors in his electric car company Tesla are demanding he refocus and work a 40-hour week in return for his pay package. And a federal judge ruled this week that Musk is actually the head of Doge and not just an advisor, which undermines the legal authority of Doge. The North America editor for our partners at the BBC, Sarah Smith, is following this.

This comes after he very publicly criticised Donald Trump's huge spending bill that's just been passed by the House of Representatives. He said he was really disappointed in it because there was too much spending. It was going to increase the budget deficit and actually undermine all the work he'd been doing to try and cut government spending. And Donald Trump obviously doesn't like that kind of criticism. His time in government has not gone brilliantly for him, and it's really hurt his personal brand as well. Tesla cars sales have gone off a cliff.

Tesla sales fell 49 percent in Europe compared to a year earlier. Beyond his Trump work, many European car buyers have not liked Musk's endorsement of a right-wing anti-immigrant party in Germany. Tesla also faces tough competition from electric car companies out of China. In the U.S., high Biden and Trump-era tariffs on China's electric cars have limited that competition.

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The Social Security Administration is cutting one in eight of its staff, about 12 percent, one part of the Trump administration's cost-cutting drive. This includes people you see when you go into a field office for help. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer went to one in upstate New York.

The Social Security office in Schenectady, New York, lost about a third of its staff last month, according to the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees. Its vice president, Rennie Glasgow, is a claims technical expert at the office. He says walk-in clients in particular are feeling the effects of the cuts. Our wait times have gone from about 30 minutes, 35 minutes, to about an hour. Last couple of days, I've seen people wait here for two hours.

Glasgow estimates foot traffic has doubled over the past few months. He says the waiting room is clogged at the beginning of every month with people who've had problems with their check or direct deposit. People come in all the time just to be sure they'll get that month's payment. Immigrants who've become citizens are also coming in to be sure their status is correct in Social Security's database.

Adam Chacko is an engineering professor who immigrated from Cameroon. He waited close to two hours, but it's OK. I'm on vacation. Chacko used a vacation day because he knew it might take a while. Kristen Hoffman was also ready to camp out. She came into the office clutching a copy of Pride and Prejudice.

Her visit was routine, a monthly check-in required for her Social Security disability benefit. Still, she waited... Hour and 40 minutes.

Wait times did improve in the afternoon, but union rep Renny Glasgow says that's because the office manager moved workers from answering phones to helping walk-ins, which meant a longer wait for callers. Glasgow says he's seeing more people coming in because they can't get through on the phone. They tell him, I was waiting on the phone for three hours and then I got dropped and I just decided to come in. Now I have to wait here for two hours. This is ridiculous.

Something like that happened to 73-year-old Tony Canastraci. He came in to submit paperwork for his wife, and he was here last month, too. The last time I was here was because I could not get through anybody on the phone. That's when I waited 45 minutes and said, I got to go, I got things to do.

Customers are stressing out, says Chris Delaney, another union official and acclaimed representative in the Hudson, New York, field office. And they're angry. Before, they made Felix slapping you, but now they want to throw your ass off a bridge. I reached out to Social Security for comment on the situation in Schenectady, but didn't hear back by deadline. In Schenectady, New York, I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace.

And in New York City, I'm David Brancaccio. You're listening to the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media. Hi, I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director, and I'm excited to be joining the hosts of our flagship podcast, Uncanny Valley.

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