REFUND TARIFFS

“In February, when the Supreme Court declared the lion's share of President Trump's tariffs illegal, the justices left one big question unanswered. Ever since Trump's sweeping tariffs, companies big and small have altogether paid the government billions of dollars. It is $166 billion. So you know, the federal government has never been told that it has to give back that much money before.”

“After Trump's tariffs, companies flooded the Court of International Trade with lawsuits, arguing that the administration's terrorists were illegal. And now that the Supreme Court has sided with these companies, the Court of International Trade has to deal with more than 3,000 refund requests. All these lawsuits are largely carbon copies of one another.”

“Right away, Judge Eaton is like, listen, you have to pay this money back and it shouldn't be that hard. You all have done this before. You can, you have the tools you need. Just start issuing refunds. This, you know, this should be easy. I believe that there will be no chaos associated with the provision of these refunds and that it will not result in a mess.”

“And the government was like, wait, wait, wait. This is actually gonna be more complicated than you think and we have to create a system and we can't just push a button and give everybody refunds. There are tens of millions of entries and so obviously that is going to require a significant effort. At one point, the government's lawyer suggested that the process would require a person to manually review each payment.”

“The government said that importers are going to have to basically keep a spreadsheet, create a spreadsheet of all of their imports and all of the tariffs that they paid and make their own calculations, basically do their own accounting. And they're going to have to take that spreadsheet and upload it to the government's system.”