Will Tariffs End Now That Democrats Control Congress?

At 12:01 a.m. on July 24, a 10% surcharge on nearly everything the country imports stopped being collected. No one voted to repeal it. The law behind it, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, lets a president impose a surcharge for 150 days and no longer, unless Congress extends it. Congress never held the vote. The clock ran out.

It was the one tariff this year that only Congress could keep alive. On Jan. 3, Democrats take control of both chambers, and the question importers are typing into search bars this week is whether the rest of the duties go the same way.

They are unlikely to, at least not because of Tuesday. The tariffs still being collected rest on laws that let the president keep them, change them or drop them. The main routes to ending them run through the White House, through a Congress with enough votes to override a veto, or through the courts. Tuesday's result did not deliver the second, and it does not touch the other two. The prudent budget for next year has today's duties in it.

Two laws still standing

The duties at the border today are what survived a year of legal reversals. On Feb. 20 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3, in Learning Resources v. Trump, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize tariffs. Four days later the administration put the Section 122 surcharge in their place, and in July that ran out too. What remains rests on two older laws. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a national security statute, products made almost entirely of steel, aluminum or copper have paid 50% of their full customs value since April 6, and other derivative products pay 25%. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 carries the China duties and other trade remedies.

What the duties add up to

Our tariff ledger shows what that adds up to for the goods factories buy. It divides estimated duties by import value across 36 families of industrial inputs. In January 2025, an importer of those goods paid about $3.85 in duty on every $100 of merchandise. By October 2025 the duty had risen to $19.95, 5.2 times the January level. The court's ruling brought the ledger's first sustained drop, and the end of the surcharge in July barely moved it at all, a sign that most of the duty on industrial inputs sits under the laws still standing: the ledger read $14.66 in July and $14.45 in August 2026, 3.8 times its level when 2025 began.

That is an average across the families we track, not anyone's bill. What a given importer pays depends on what it buys, where it comes from, how it is classified and which exclusions apply.

What the record can and cannot show

Supporters of the tariffs point to output and sourcing. Manufacturing output in September 2026 was the highest since August 2019, and China's share of U.S. imports fell in every one of the 32 input families we can compare between 2018 and 2025. Critics point to cost. Steel that cost a buyer $100 in January 2025 costs $149 now, by the producer price index for steel mill products, and factory payrolls, at 12.652 million in September 2026, were 21,000 below where they stood in January 2025.

What none of those numbers can show is the counterfactual: how output, jobs and prices would have moved without the duties. A time series cannot answer that, and anyone who says it does is selling something.

The case that the tariffs end soon

The argument that the tariffs are on their way out deserves its strongest form. Congress has already ended one this year, without casting a vote. Before the election, a group of Republicans signed onto bipartisan bills that would let any presidential tariff expire after 40 days unless Congress approved it, Al Jazeera reported. House Democrats have said they will move quickly on legislation to end the global tariffs and restore Congress's power over trade, Yahoo Finance reported. The political momentum is real.

Where the July lapse does not apply

But the July clock ran only because Section 122 gave Congress the last word, and Sections 232 and 301 do not. Overriding a veto takes 67 senators and 290 members of the House, and on early counts the new Senate majority holds about 54 seats.

There is a precedent, and it is recent. After Democrats won the House in 2018, under this same president, they did not repeal a single Section 232 or Section 301 tariff. China duties went up after they took the gavel, in May and again in September 2019. In our ledger the duty rate even eased a little over that year, for reasons the ledger ties to no legal action, so we tie it to none. The House spent its trade power on something else. It held the USMCA until the administration accepted labor rules it could enforce, then passed it.

After Democrats won the House in 2018, under this same president, they did not repeal a single Section 232 or Section 301 tariff.

What the new majority can do, and when

The new majority's power starts on Jan. 3, and most of it is indirect. The Dec. 11 funding deadline belongs to the outgoing Congress. Whatever it passes, the new majority will write the full-year 2027 spending bills if they are still open, and every spending bill after that. It will run the committees that can call hearings on refunds, exclusions and the process for adding products to Section 232, and it will vote on any trade agreement that needs a law. The 40-day bill gets its best chance of a floor vote, where it would still meet a veto.

Businesses are not waiting for the outcome. The Federal Reserve's October Beige Book recorded what they are doing instead: “Firms in several Districts cited persistent uncertainty around energy and tariffs and expect that prices will increase further in the coming months, as existing contracts expire, and firms must renegotiate hedge contracts for their own inputs and/or delivery contracts to their customers.”¹

A scenario for the budget

One way to size the stakes is to ask what two historical average rates imply for a $1 million purchase total. On $1 million of these inputs, the August 2026 average implies about $144,500 in duty. At the January 2025 average it would be about $38,500. The gap of roughly $106,000 is what a plan assumes away if it budgets for the basket's rate to return to its January 2025 level. It is an illustration, not a repricing: it applies each basket rate to an illustrative $1 million purchase total, and the basket's average can move when the mix of goods or source countries changes even if no tariff does.

The tariff burden estimator applies the rates your products actually face, by tariff line and source country, instead of the ledger's average. Budget the duty on your own basket

The July surcharge expired on a date written into its own law. None of the remaining duties runs out on a date that only Congress can extend. For a 2027 budget, they are part of the price.

Further reading

• Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, Supreme Court of the United States, decided Feb. 20, 2026, via Justia.
• Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, Congressional Research Service.
• President Trump makes major changes to Section 232 tariffs on aluminum, steel and copper, Thompson Hine, April 2026.
• Tariffs to Iran war: can Democrats reverse Trump policy with midterms win?, Al Jazeera, Nov. 4, 2026.
• Democrats won control of Congress. Their economic agenda is set to target healthcare, tariffs and Trump's allies, Yahoo Finance, Nov. 4, 2026.
• U.S. Manufacturing Effective-Tariff Index, the ledger behind this story, with every monthly observation.