Will the Trump Administration Pay the Tariff Refunds It Promised?
· Reason
In the days since President Donald Trump's tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court, administration officials and the president himself have signaled an unwillingness to refund hundreds of billions of dollars of illegally collected taxes.
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That's despite the fact that the Trump administration told courts and the media last year that it would be willing and able to issue refunds if the tariffs were blocked.
Thousands of companies, including some big names like FedEx and Costco, have already filed lawsuits seeking refunds of tariff bills. Nonprofits that represented small businesses in the tariff fight are doing the same. At stake: about $175 billion in revenue collected via the tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled unlawful last week.
But during a press conference shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling, Trump indicated that he expects a drawn-out legal battle over those payments, saying that the issue might "get litigated for the next two years."
Trump blamed the Supreme Court for not directly addressing the question of refunds in its ruling.
"Wouldn't you think they would have put one sentence in there saying…keep the money or don't keep the money," Trump told reporters. "It's almost like not written by smart people. And what do they do? They don't even talk about that."
It seems likely that the Supreme Court did not wade into the refund issue because that matter had already been settled when the tariff case was in front of lower courts.
When the Court of International Trade ruled against Trump's tariffs in May 2025, attorneys from the Trump administration argued against the need for any injunction to block the ongoing collection of tariffs while the case was on appeal—because the plaintiffs could easily be made whole after the fact.
The administration "can fully remedy any harms by obtaining a refund of any tariffs ultimately held invalid," Trump's attorneys promised.
In December, attorneys for the Trump administration repeated that promise as litigation over the injunction continued. At that time, the administration said it "will not oppose or object to the Court's authority to order reliquidation of plaintiffs' subject entries of merchandise" if the tariffs were ultimately ruled invalid.
They repeated that promise in January, when attorneys for U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the CIT that the government did not intend to "challenge the court's authority to order reliquidation."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also acknowledged in interviews that tariff refunds would have to be issued if the courts ultimately ruled against the Trump administration. Asked during a September appearance on NBC's Meet The Press about the possibility of tariff refunds, Bessent was unambiguous: "If the court says it, we'd have to do it."
After the Supreme Court's ruling, Bessent seemed to backpedal from that position.
"This could be a mess. This could take months, this could take years to litigate and to get to the payouts," Bessent told Fox News on Friday.
Bessent also accused the Supreme Court of being "discombobulated" on the refund issue and echoed Trump's surprise at the lack of clarity on that topic. This is all pretty disingenuous. The Supreme Court did not need to delve into the refund question because there was no dispute over that. Both sides of the tariff lawsuit had agreed in lower courts that refunds would be paid.
"The government cannot promise the courts that refunds will be automatic if the unlawful tariffs are struck down at the Supreme Court and then, after the decision, say those refunds might take years," said Sara Albrecht, chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, one of the legal nonprofits representing small businesses that paid the unlawful tariffs, in a statement. "This is simple: the government unlawfully imposed a tax on Americans and took their money. We'd like it back."
The federal government should not be allowed to keep $175 billion it illegally collected from American businesses just because it would be complicated to refund the money. And it certainly shouldn't get away with that scam after telling courts and the public that refunds would be readily available.
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