Washington Joins 25 States Suing Trump Administration Over New Tariffs

Washington joined 24 other states on Monday in a federal lawsuit challenging President Trump's latest round of tariffs, arguing in the U.S. Court of International Trade that the administration has once again exceeded its legal authority to unilaterally tax imports. The suit, filed the same day the tariffs took effect, targets 10% to 12.5% duties imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on goods from roughly 60 trading partners that together account for 99.4% of everything the United States imports, according to CNBC. It is the third time in five months this coalition of states has sued the administration over tariff policy, and the second time Washington Attorney General Nick Brown has joined a challenge naming Section 301 specifically.

"Washington consumers and businesses deserve economic stability from their federal government, not constant whiplash," Brown said in a statement announcing the state's participation, reported by Fox 13 Seattle. "This latest round of tariffs will increase prices for Washingtonians." The filing lands one day after the duties themselves took effect, meaning Washington importers are already paying them while the legal fight over whether they were ever authorized in the first place is just beginning in court.

What the New Section 301 Tariffs Actually Do

The tariffs at issue took effect July 24, one day after the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative formally announced them, and apply a flat 10% or 12.5% duty to nearly every category of goods imported from the affected countries. The list of covered trading partners is unusually broad, spanning Canada, the European Union, Mexico, Taiwan, China, Japan and South Korea, among roughly 55 others, per CNBC's reporting on the filing.

The administration's legal justification this time traces back further than the tariffs themselves. USTR opened the underlying Section 301 investigation on March 12, 2026, directed by the president to examine whether 60 trading partners were failing to prohibit and enforce bans on goods made with forced labor. A June 2 findings report concluded that six of those economies, including Canada, the European Union and Mexico, had forced-labor import bans on the books but failed to enforce them effectively, while the remaining 54 had no such prohibition at all. That report is what USTR cited when it proposed the 10% and 12.5% tariffs now in effect.

The states argue that sequence is a pretext rather than a genuine trade remedy. Their complaint, detailed by Spectrum News, contends the four-month investigation was opened and concluded on a compressed timeline specifically to manufacture legal cover for tariffs nearly identical in scope and rate to the ones courts already struck down twice this year under different statutes. The coalition describes the new duties, in effect, as the same tariffs wearing a different legal justification, with forced labor as the stated rationale rather than the emergency powers or balance-of-payments arguments the administration tried and lost with previously. The rate itself is the tell, the states argue: 10% and 12.5% duties on the same roughly 60 countries land within a percentage point of the earlier IEEPA and Section 122 tariffs, even though the legal theory behind each has been entirely different.

A Legal Strategy Two Courts Have Already Rejected

The August 3 filing is not Washington's first fight over tariffs this year, and it is not even the coalition's first. The states' complaint leans heavily on that history. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law the administration first used to impose sweeping tariffs, does not give the president authority to set import taxes without congressional action. The administration did not retreat from tariffs generally; it pivoted instead to Section 122 of the Trade Act, which allows temporary duties to address balance-of-payments deficits rather than open-ended emergency powers.

That attempt fared no better. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled the Section 122 tariffs unlawful too, reasoning that a persistent trade deficit is not the kind of balance-of-payments emergency the statute contemplates. Brown's office secured that ruling specifically for Washington, with the court enjoining the tariffs' application to the state, according to the Attorney General's own announcement of the win. "This is a win for both affordability and the rule of law," Brown said at the time, adding that the ruling "will encourage more parties to challenge this illegal executive overreach."

The Section 301 tariffs now being challenged are the administration's third legal theory in five months, and the states' newest complaint frames the pattern as evasion rather than good-faith rulemaking. It argues the administration is cycling through statutes, emergency powers, then balance-of-payments authority, now a forced-labor investigation, until a court lets one stick, rather than seeking the congressional authorization that tariffs of this scale and duration would otherwise require under the Constitution's grant of taxing power to Congress. Whether that argument succeeds a third time is an open question; Section 301, unlike the two statutes courts have already rejected, was written specifically to authorize tariffs, which gives the administration a stronger textual footing than it had in either prior case.

How a 12-State Coalition Grew to 25

Washington's involvement traces back to April 2025, when twelve states, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Vermont, filed the coalition's first tariff lawsuit in the same court, arguing the president lacked constitutional authority to impose tariffs unilaterally, according to PBS NewsHour's coverage of that original filing. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called the tariff scheme "insane" at the time, and the complaint argued the emergency powers law required threats that were "unusual and extraordinary," a standard the states said an ordinary trade deficit could not meet.

That original suit came about a week after California Governor Gavin Newsom filed a separate federal challenge to the same policy. Both cases fed into the litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court in February. Each successive round of tariffs, and each successive lawsuit, has pulled in more states: Washington, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia and Wisconsin all joined later rounds, and Monday's filing adds the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania as parties for the first time. That progression, twelve states in April 2025, roughly two dozen by the March 2026 Section 122 filing, twenty-five plus two governors now, tracks almost exactly with how many separate tariff schemes the administration has attempted, as if each new legal theory recruits its own wave of plaintiffs rather than losing momentum after two defeats.

The expanding coalition reflects a broader shift in strategy. What began fifteen months ago as a handful of states challenging one emergency-powers statute has become a standing, twenty-five-state legal operation built specifically to intercept each new tariff mechanism the administration tries next, with Arizona, California and Oregon now co-leading every filing in the series and a shared legal team that can move within days of a new tariff taking effect. Washington has been a plaintiff in every round since it first joined, which is itself notable: unlike several coalition members that came and went depending on which tariffs hit their specific industries hardest, Washington's trade exposure across aerospace, agriculture and port logistics gives it a stake in essentially every version of the policy the administration has tried.

Why Washington Has More at Stake Than Most States

Washington is one of the most trade-exposed states in the country, with roughly 40% of jobs connected in some way to international trade and close to $60 billion in annual exports, according to the state's Office of Financial Management and reporting by KUOW. An OFM analysis of the administration's earlier tariff rounds estimated that tariffs at this scale put approximately 30,000 Washington jobs at risk, concentrated in two industries the state's economy leans on heavily: aerospace and agriculture.

Boeing accounts for a large share of Washington's aircraft exports, and the company's supply chains run through many of the same countries now facing new duties, meaning the tariffs raise costs on imported components even as they invite retaliatory tariffs on the finished jets Boeing sells abroad. Washington's apple, cherry and hop growers face a similar squeeze, and it is not a hypothetical one: growers still remember the 2018-19 trade war with China, when retaliatory tariffs "devastated" the state's agricultural industry with sharp drops in apple and cherry revenue, a precedent Washington State Department of Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn has pointed to directly in describing why growers are anxious again.

The ripple effects extend to the ports themselves. Seattle and Tacoma handle a large share of the trans-Pacific cargo now subject to new duties, and Canada remains one of Washington's largest sources of imported energy products, meaning the tariffs touch fuel and utility costs as well as retail goods. Slower or costlier trade flows translate into fewer hours for longshore and warehouse workers up and down Puget Sound, independent of whatever a court eventually decides. Technology and clean-energy firms operating in the state have raised a related concern: components tied to federal clean-energy incentives often cross the same borders now facing new duties, layering tariff costs on top of projects already built around a different set of federal assumptions.

The White House Defends Its Authority

The administration is not conceding the point. White House spokesperson Kush Desai defended the tariffs as a lawful response to trade practices that harm American businesses, saying the administration "is using its lawful authority to obtain the elimination of unreasonable acts, policies, and practices that burden U.S. commerce," according to Spectrum News. That framing leans on Section 301's original statutory purpose, countering unfair foreign trade conduct rather than raising general revenue, which is precisely the distinction the states dispute in their complaint.

Other attorneys general in the coalition made similar arguments in sharper terms. New York Attorney General Letitia James said "after losing at the Supreme Court, the federal administration is again trying to raise taxes on families and businesses with another round of illegal tariffs." California Attorney General Rob Bonta went further, arguing the administration "is so intent on raising the cost of living for Americans that he is willing to break law after law." Neither statement addressed the specific forced-labor findings USTR cited as the investigation's basis, focusing instead on the broader pattern of repeated tariff attempts.

Arizona and Oregon co-led Monday's filing alongside California, with Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin joining as plaintiff states, along with the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania as named parties for the first time in the litigation series. Notably absent from the coalition is any Republican-led state attorney general's office. The complaint itself is framed as a separation-of-powers question rather than a partisan one, resting on which branch of government holds the power to set tariffs, but in practice the challenge has so far been pursued exclusively by Democratic administrations, a pattern unbroken across all three rounds of litigation since April 2025.

The Costs Consumers Are Already Absorbing

Separate from the legal question of presidential authority, Washington's own state estimates, cited in KUOW's reporting on the tariffs, put the consumer pass-through rate as high as 93%, meaning nearly the entire cost of a tariff lands on American shoppers and businesses rather than the foreign exporter it is nominally aimed at. That pass-through rate is central to the states' broader argument: even a temporary tariff, later struck down in court, still extracts real money from households and companies in the months before a ruling arrives.

That dynamic helps explain why Washington keeps returning to court instead of waiting out each new attempt. The May ruling that struck down the Section 122 tariffs did not require the administration to reimburse everything already collected, and the coalition's newest complaint explicitly asks the court to order refunds this time, an acknowledgment that winning a ruling after duties have already been paid is a partial remedy at best for businesses that raised prices or absorbed losses while the case was pending.

For a state as trade-dependent as Washington, that lag between imposition and a final ruling is not an abstraction. It shows up in aerospace suppliers' quarterly costs and in grocery-store price tags well before any court settles whether the tariffs were ever legal in the first place. Nguyễn has described the mood among affected Washington businesses in blunt terms: "the anxiety is because they don't feel like anybody is supporting them right now," he said, framing his agency's role as trying to close that gap while the legal fight plays out. A refund, if the state eventually wins one, would also arrive on the court's timeline rather than the business's: a Puget Sound importer that raises prices in August to cover a tariff later ruled unlawful in December has no mechanism to retroactively lower prices already charged to customers in the interim, so the practical harm outlasts the legal victory.

What Happens Next in the Court of International Trade

The case now goes to the same specialized federal court that has already ruled against the administration twice this year on closely related legal theory, which gives the states a procedural head start even as the administration argues Section 301 rests on different statutory footing than IEEPA or Section 122. The court will need to decide whether the underlying forced-labor investigation, opened in March and concluded in June, was a genuine trade action or, as the states allege, a legal workaround built to survive after two prior tariff schemes collapsed on unrelated legal grounds.

No hearing date had been set as of Monday evening. Given the pace of the two earlier cases, both resolved within roughly three months of filing, a ruling could plausibly arrive by early winter, though the administration retains the option to appeal any adverse decision to the Federal Circuit, extending the timeline well into 2027 and leaving the tariffs in place throughout the appeal. That asymmetry, a fast trial court ruling followed by a slow appellate process during which the challenged policy stays in effect, is part of why the states keep asking for refunds rather than relying on an injunction alone; an injunction stops future collection, but only a refund order addresses money already taken.

Until then, the tariffs remain in effect, and Washington importers, exporters and consumers are absorbing their cost in real time. Brown's office tracks this and every other case the state has brought against the administration on its federal litigation tracker, a public record that now lists 70 separate actions filed or joined since early 2025, a pace that shows no sign of slowing as the administration tests new legal theories for a policy two courts have already rejected.