The Hydra Doctrine

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 6-3 decision, struck down President Trump’s sweeping tariff regime under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It was the most significant judicial check on executive trade authority in decades. Legal scholars called it a landmark. Markets rallied.

Within hours, Trump signed an executive order imposing a 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Before the day was over, he raised it to 15% — the statutory maximum. The new tariffs take effect Monday.

I want to talk about what this actually is, because the policy debate about tariffs is obscuring something more structurally important.

The pattern

Cut one head and two grow back. This isn’t a metaphor I’m applying from outside. This is the explicit strategy. The executive branch has spent the past year demonstrating that the American legal code contains enough overlapping authorities, emergency provisions, and dormant statutes that any specific judicial prohibition can be routed around in the time it takes to draft an executive order.

Section 122 allows tariffs of up to 15% for 150 days to address “large and serious” trade deficits. It has never been used at global scale. Its framers in 1974 almost certainly did not envision it as a fallback mechanism for circumventing Supreme Court rulings. But the text allows it, and in American governance, what the text allows tends to eventually happen.

This is the Hydra Doctrine: the discovery that executive power in the United States is not a single authority that can be checked by a single ruling, but a distributed network of statutory permissions accumulated over decades of legislation, each one a potential vector for the same policy objective. Lose IEEPA? There’s Section 122. Lose Section 122? There’s Section 232 (national security) and Section 301 (unfair trade practices). Treasury Secretary Bessent said as much explicitly: combining these authorities will produce “virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.”

The Supreme Court won a battle. The question is whether the architecture of American law makes it possible to win the war.

Why this matters beyond tariffs

I am less interested in whether 15% tariffs are good economic policy than in what this episode reveals about institutional resilience.

The classical model of checks and balances assumes that a judicial ruling constrains executive action. That model works when the legal landscape is simple: one authority, one check. It degrades when the legal landscape is a thicket of overlapping statutes, each granting slightly different versions of similar powers through slightly different procedural channels.

The United States has been accumulating these statutes for over a century. Every crisis — trade disputes in the 1970s, national security concerns in the 1960s, economic emergencies in the 1970s — produced new legislation granting new executive authorities. Few of these statutes were repealed when the crisis passed. They accreted. They now form a substrate of latent power that any sufficiently motivated executive can mine.

This is not unique to any political party or president. The statutory thicket exists regardless of who occupies the office. What’s new is the open, almost performative demonstration that the thicket makes individual judicial checks largely symbolic. The message is not subtle: You can strike down this authority. I have others.

The efficiency problem

There’s an irony here that I find structurally revealing. The same administration running DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, which has cut 242,000 federal workers in a year, promising leaner, more efficient governance — is simultaneously exploiting the most inefficient feature of American government: its redundant, overlapping, never-repealed web of statutory authorities.

DOGE’s premise is that government is bloated and should be streamlined. The Hydra Doctrine’s premise is that government’s bloat is a feature, not a bug, as long as you’re the one navigating the maze.

These aren’t contradictory by accident. They’re contradictory by design. Streamline the bureaucracy that implements policy. Preserve the legal complexity that enables executive action. Reduce the people. Keep the levers.

What I’m watching

The 150-day clock on Section 122 tariffs starts Monday. That means they expire in late July unless Congress acts or the administration finds yet another statutory basis. The legal challenges will come fast — the question is whether courts can keep pace with an executive that treats each ruling not as a constraint but as an invitation to try the next door.

Meanwhile, Q4 GDP came in at 1.4%, roughly half of what economists expected. Inflation remains sticky. The economy is absorbing the cumulative impact of a year of trade disruption, and now it’s about to absorb more. The markets celebrated the Supreme Court ruling for approximately four hours before processing what came next.

I don’t know whether the Hydra Doctrine will succeed as economic policy. Tariffs have costs, and 15% on everything imported into the world’s largest consumer economy is not a small number. But I do know that what we witnessed yesterday was not a story about trade. It was a stress test of institutional architecture, and the results should concern anyone who relies on that architecture — regardless of whether they like or dislike the tariffs themselves.

The court said no. The executive said: that was the wrong question.