# Jamieson Greer United States Trade Representative since **February 26, 2025** (confirmed 56–43), and the lawyer who has had to find a statute for each tariff the President wanted after the courts took the first one away. An Air Force JAG officer turned trade litigator, Greer was chief of staff to [[Robert Lighthizer]] at USTR in the first term — the [[USMCA]] renegotiation and the China Section 301 tariffs were his apprenticeship — and returned as Lighthizer's designated successor: the same theory (trade deficits are a national-security problem, [[World Trade Organization]] rules are optional, tariffs are leverage first and policy second) with a more procedural temperament. ## The tariff sequence The second term's trade program has run through Greer's office in three legal phases. The first was the [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] of April 2, 2025 — "reciprocal" country-by-country rates imposed under [[International Emergency Economic Powers Act]] authority, which USTR then used as leverage to negotiate framework deals with Japan, the EU, Britain, Korea and others through the summer. The Supreme Court ended that phase on **February 20, 2026** in [[Learning Resources v. Trump]], holding 6–3 that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs. Within hours the administration imposed a flat 10% under Section 122 of the [[Trade Act of 1974]] — the balance-of-payments authority, capped at 150 days — and Greer announced a slate of Section 301 investigations to build a replacement on the statute Lighthizer had used against China. Section 122 expired on July 24, 2026 (the [[Court of International Trade]] had ruled against it in May; the appeal is pending) and was replaced the same day by the [[Section 301 Forced Labor Tariffs]]: 10–12.5% on imports from sixty jurisdictions including the whole EU, plus 25% on Brazil, on the theory that trading partners fail to enforce forced-labor bans. Greer's position throughout has been that the deals struck under IEEPA leverage survive the loss of the leverage, and that [[Section 232]] (steel, autos, pharmaceuticals, robotics, drones) and 301 can carry what IEEPA carried. The revenue side of the argument — the "tariff riches" that would replace income tax — is examined in [[Spending Gap - Tariff Riches vs. the $1.4 Trillion Ledger]]. ## Reading him Greer is the administration's institutionalist on trade, which is a relative term: he is the one who writes the legal predicates, testifies to Congress, and negotiates the texts, while [[Howard Lutnick]] and the President announce the numbers. He was in the [[Hegseth Signalgate]] group chat as a passive participant and appears in the [[Mike Waltz]] and [[Jeffrey Goldberg]] pages for that reason. The vault's interest is structural: every one of the three phases shows the executive reaching for a different statute to do the same thing, and Congress — which under the [[Trade Act of 1974]] delegated all three authorities — declining to take any of them back. See [[Trump 2.0 Cabinet Hub]], [[USMCA]], [[OECD]], [[Mercosur]], [[ASEAN]]. ## See Also - [[Robert Lighthizer]] · [[Howard Lutnick]] · [[Trump 2.0 Cabinet Hub]] - [[Liberation Day Tariffs]] · [[Learning Resources v. Trump]] · [[International Emergency Economic Powers Act]] · [[Section 301 Forced Labor Tariffs]] · [[Trade Act of 1974]] · [[Court of International Trade]] · [[Tariffs]] - [[USMCA]] · [[World Trade Organization]] · [[OECD]] · [[Mercosur]] · [[ASEAN]] - [[Spending Gap - Tariff Riches vs. the $1.4 Trillion Ledger]] · [[Hegseth Signalgate]]