The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was written to be a leash. Congress, tired of four decades of unexamined emergency powers, demanded that every declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to the legislature, and lapse unless renewed each year. The whole design assumed that emergencies would be rare, and that rarity would be the check.
Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the leash has become a rubber stamp. Twelve new national emergencies have been declared since January 2025: for the border, for cartels, for energy, for tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, Brazil, and the world, for the ICC, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for the bulk-power grid. Twelve emergencies, and not one of them was an emergency in any ordinary sense of the word. They were vehicles.
That is the abuse, and it is the point. The emergency power is not being used because there are twelve crises. It is being used because it is the fastest way to get the president what he wants without Congress. Tariffs he could not get through a vote became “emergencies.” Sanctions became “emergencies.” A permitting shortcut for fossil fuels became an “emergency.” The declaration is the workaround, and the workaround is the system.
The courts have noticed. In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariff program in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, holding that the statute does not authorize tariffs at all. It was the first time in the modern era that the Court meaningfully constrained the emergency powers. And the administration’s response was not to stop declaring emergencies. It was to migrate to the next available statute, then the next. The declarations themselves were never touched. EO 14389, which ended the tariff duties, said in terms that the emergencies “remain in effect and shall not be affected by this order.” The emergency outlived the action that made it controversial. That is not a bug. It is the design.
What makes this abuse so hard to stop is that each individual declaration is defensible on its own terms. A border crisis is real. Energy policy is real. Cartels are real. But the pattern is not a series of judgments about threats. It is a method of government: declare, act, dare someone to stop you, and keep the declaration alive long after the action has been checked. The NEA’s annual renewal, designed as a check, has functioned as a formality. Congress has voted to terminate exactly one of these emergencies, the energy emergency, and it failed both times.
The deeper problem is what the abuse does to the word “emergency” itself. When everything is an emergency, nothing is. The power to act swiftly in a genuine crisis depends on the public believing that the power is used sparingly. Every manufactured emergency spends that credibility. The boy who cried wolf was not punished for lying about a wolf. He was punished for making the village unable to tell a real wolf from a false alarm. We are now twelve false alarms in, and the village has stopped listening.
This is not a question of whether the president’s goals are good or bad. It is a question of whether the machinery of government still means what it says. A national emergency is supposed to be the exception that proves the rule of ordinary law. When it becomes the rule, the exception is gone, and so is the restraint it was meant to protect.
The abuse is the system. That is the sentence that should worry us, because it means the fix is not a court case or a vote. It is a decision, by the people who still believe in the difference between an emergency and a preference, to stop accepting the word at face value. Twelve emergencies in eighteen months is not a record of threats. It is a record of a president who has learned that the emergency power is the one door he does not have to knock on.
PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman