Having collected tariffs illegally for over a year, the Trump administration now has to pay them back:
The U.S. government is set to launch an online portal next week that lets businesses request refunds for tariffs deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. But payouts won’t be automatic, and legal experts said businesses could face other obstacles getting their money back. A federal agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), will boot up the portal — known as CAPE, for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries — so companies can submit claims for tariff refunds. CBP confirmed in a filing on Tuesday that CAPE will open for refund applications on April 20. The government could owe businesses up to $175 billion. . . . As of April 9, more than 56,000 U.S. importers had registered to receive refunds, according to CBP. Up to 82% of IEEPA duty payments, amounting to $127 billion, are eligible for refunds in CAPE’s initial deployment.
Refunds aren’t automatic; the burden is still on the importer to compute, document, and present claims for refunds. (The winners, as always: the lawyers.) And only the direct importer gets a refund — not downstream retailers (unless, like Costco or Walmart, they’re big enough to have done their own importing), not domestic manufacturers who bought imported supplies (or components built with them) from an intermediary, and certainly not the consumer, to whom the costs may have been passed on. The same thing will happen again if further challenges to Trump’s substitute tariffs are successful.
All of this could have been avoided had Trump, at the outset of his term when he was at the peak of his political mandate, gone to Congress to ask for more tariffs and more explicit authority to use them for negotiating leverage. That would not have made the tariffs a better policy, but if enacted, they would have been on sound legal footing and avoided the spectacle of the government having to cut big checks to businesses while consumers are left holding the bag.