The live US tariff schedule still prints duties that were terminated months ago
The HTSUS carries the IEEPA headings 9903.01.20, .24 and .25 in full, with note text intact and no termination annotation, months after an Executive Order ended them.
- How it was measured
- Read the live chapter 99 schedule and the terminating Executive Order side by side. The order directed agencies only to determine WHETHER modifications were necessary, so the schedule was never amended.
- Evidence current as of
Verifying a duty rate against the live tariff schedule feels like the gold standard. It is a primary source, published by the administering agency, with today's date on the page.
It can still be wrong, and here is how.
All IEEPA-based China tariffs were terminated by Executive Order in February 2026, following a Supreme Court ruling that the statute does not authorise tariffs. The Section 122 surcharge that briefly replaced them expired in July.
The schedule still lists them. Headings 9903.01.20, 9903.01.24 and 9903.01.25 remain in chapter 99, with their U.S. note text intact and no annotation marking them dead.
Why? The terminating order directed agencies to determine whether HTS modifications were necessary. Nobody was told to delete the lines, so nobody did.
The failure mode
An analyst who verifies "against the live HTSUS" and stops there reads terminated law as current — while correctly citing a primary source, on a page carrying today's date.
Ordinary staleness announces itself. A page stamped "Last updated: October 2021" tells you what you are looking at. This does not. The publisher is authoritative, the URL is canonical, the page is current, and the rate is dead.
Checking the date does not catch this. Nothing about the artefact is old.
The rule that does
The schedule gives you the RATE. The register gives you the AUTHORITY.
A number without a live legal instrument behind it is not verified, however current the page looks.
Generalised beyond tariffs: a published figure and the thing that makes it operative are often two different documents, and the second one is the one nobody fetches. Prices in a catalogue and the contract that sets them. A rate card and the media kit's effective date. A specification and the standard it claims to implement.
A second finding from the same exercise
The same check turned up that two product lines a single "chargers from China" model would treat identically sit on entirely different legal tracks — 37.5% for one, 40.9% for the other, because lithium-ion batteries were never on the original tariff lists at all and became dutiable through a separate review two years later.
A 3.4-point error, invisible to anyone modelling the category rather than the commodity code.
Tracked in our ledger as HTSUS-NOT-SELF-INVALIDATING, TARIFF-IEEPA-GONE. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say what changed.