Canada on CrossGov.com

Supreme Court Strikes Down IEEPA Tariffs: $122 Billion in Refunds and the Section 301 and 232 Tariffs That Replaced Them

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act doesn’t give the President the power to impose tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Learning Resources v. Trump, decided together with V.O.S. Selections. Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito dissented.

The ruling knocked out the legal basis for most of the tariffs imposed since early 2025. Customs and Border Protection stopped collecting them on 24 February. By then it had taken in about $166 billion from more than 330,000 importers.

Five Eyes Under Strain: Allies Limit Intelligence Sharing With Washington Case by Case

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The UKUSA agreement was signed in March 1946, between Britain and the United States. Canada joined in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956. For most of the eighty years since, the arrangement now called Five Eyes has been the closest intelligence partnership between sovereign states anywhere. Raw signals intelligence moves between the five almost as if they were one service.

That still mostly holds. What changed in 2025 is the edges. Several allies now decide case by case what they hand to Washington, and Washington has started deciding case by case what it hands back.

Why Government IT Projects Fail: HealthCare.gov, the FBI's Virtual Case File and the Lessons From Phoenix, Horizon and Robodebt

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1 October 2013 HealthCare.gov opened and buckled on day one. The HHS inspector general later counted nearly $800 million obligated across 60 contracts by February 2014. A decade earlier the FBI had scrapped its Virtual Case File after three years and $170 million. And GAO says the federal government still spends about 80% of its more than $100 billion a year in IT on running systems it already has.

Statistics Agencies Under Strain: BLS After the Firing, ONS After the Review, and Argentina's Shelved Inflation Index

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 1 August 2025, hours after the July jobs report came out, President Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer. The report showed 73,000 new jobs, and revisions cut the previous two months by a combined 258,000. The President said the numbers were rigged. He gave no evidence.

It took a year to replace her. The first nominee, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, was named in August 2025 and withdrawn at the end of September. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ran under an acting commissioner, William Wiatrowski. In January 2026 the President nominated Brett Matsumoto, a BLS price-index economist since 2015 who had also worked at the Council of Economic Advisers. The Senate confirmed him by 51 votes to 47 in August 2026.

US Spends 3.17% of GDP on Defence While Five NATO Allies Pass 3.5% in the Alliance's 2026 Estimates

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The United States will spend about 3.17% of its GDP on core defence in 2026, according to NATO’s estimates, and still accounts for about 60% of all spending in the alliance. A year after allies agreed at The Hague to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, five of them already spend more than 3.5% on core defence, a bigger share of their economies than the US. Most of the big Western European economies are somewhere between 2% and 2.7%.