Ask anyone selling anything in the U.S. right now and they’ll probably say they want their tariff money back.
“How do we get a refund?” said Alfred Mai, whose San Francisco firm ASM Games makes card games in China and by his estimates paid more than $150,000 in tariffs that the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared unconstitutional.
“Where do I go to get a refund?”
Since the court ruling striking down about half of President Trump’s tariffs, importers and retailers have been calling, texting and emailing almost nonstop — each other, their trade groups and any lawyer on tap — asking these questions.
Some raised alarm when U.S. Customs continued to charge those very tariffs for days after the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Customs and Border Protection later said it would stop collecting these tariffs on Tuesday.
The tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down amounted to around $130 billion. Anyone who paid the taxes should get reimbursed. But the high court did not address how.
“We not only need the money back,” said Sarah Wells from Virginia, who sells backpacks and totes for breast pumps, for new moms, “but we need a process to get the money back that doesn’t involve lawyers, really time-consuming paperwork, expensive processes — none of us have the bandwidth or the resources to do that.”
Indeed, the government already has a routine process to refund tariffs in cases of, say, errors on a customs form. But on Monday, Wells dialed into a call arranged by the small-business group Main Street Alliance and heard lawyers suggest that this time, getting her money back would likely require suing the government.
“I’m so frustrated that there isn’t clear guidance that would make it easier on small businesses,” Wells said afterward. “We shouldn’t have to become litigators just to get our money back.”
Courtesy of Sarah Wells /
“A seamless process to refund tariffs”
For weeks, Wells had obsessively refreshed the Supreme Court’s website on opinion days, watching the tariff case. A coalition of small businesses not too different from hers had challenged Trump’s use of emergency authority known as IEEPA to set new taxes on virtually all imports, without congressional approval. Wells says she’s paid $35,000 for tariffs on her shipments from China and Cambodia.
On the morning of the high-court ruling, Wells’ power went out during a torrential rainstorm. She raced to the nearest cafe for internet access and thought of the ways she could use that refund money.
“If we got the refunds, I know what I would do is I would start hiring again, because we need it,” Wells said. Her firm is down a part-time customer service rep; she’d laid off staff and contractors last year, trying to afford tariffs. She held shipments abroad while scrounging for cash to pay tariffs, leaving her top-selling backpacks out of stock for months. Those costs she would never recoup. But maybe at least the duty fees?
In an urgent statement Friday, the National Retail Federation called for the lower court — the Court of International Trade — to “ensure a seamless process to refund the tariffs to U.S. importers.” After filing the lawsuit, the small-business plaintiffs in the case had asked for U.S. Customs to stop collecting tariffs as the litigation played out, but the government successfully argued there was no need: it could always issue refunds.
On Friday, in a defiant press conference, Trump quickly vowed to find new avenues to reinstate tariffs. Within hours, he set a new 10% blanket tariff; within a day, he raised it to 15%. He called the Supreme Court justices who ruled against his tariffs “fools” and “unpatriotic.” And he said that repayments to importers would get bogged down in litigation for two, maybe five years.
“Even less certainty”
Senate Democrats in the highly divided Congress introduced a bill on Monday that would require U.S. Customs to refund tariffs — with interest — within 180 days, prioritizing small businesses.
Already a long queue of companies — including Costco, Revlon and, as of Tuesday, FedEx — have lined up for refunds with preemptive lawsuits in trade court. In Indiana, Danny Reynolds, who runs the nearly century-old fashion store Stephenson’s of Elkhart, wonders where that leaves him.
“Especially for small businesses who don’t have retained legal teams to file suit and sort of get their place in line,” he said, “you sort of wonder, will there be anybody going to bat for us?”
Reynolds doesn’t import his clothes himself, but pays another company to bring in the containers. So that supplier actually pays the tariffs as the “importer of record” — but it also has been charging Reynolds a tariff fee. When, or if, this supplier gets a tariff refund, would Reynolds actually get any of his tariff fees back?
“This is so directionless,” is how Mai, the card game seller, put it. “I think there’s even less certainty of what’s going to happen over the next few months with the Supreme Court ruling, to be honest with you.”
A system exists, but will it be used?
Looking for guidance, Mai consulted AI on how tariff refunds might work and landed on the same platform as scores of other businesses: an online portal called ACE, where the government has long reviewed refund claims from businesses over clerical errors or miscalculations.
The portal seems to have a lot going for it as a refund venue. It’s a well-oiled operation that already exists. It contains meticulous records. The government knows exactly how much each importer has paid. So many business owners had the same thought that Mai struggled to log in, getting error messages for hours, then for days.
“I’m guessing everyone and their mothers are rushing in right now to try to do what I’m doing,” he said.
The Trump administration so far has not indicated any inclination toward using this existing system, falling back on comments about litigation.
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked on CNN about “the big question”: Would American businesses get their tariff money back? Bessent countered that this was, in fact, “not the big question” and touted Trump’s push to revive American manufacturing and reduce trade imbalances. No matter the question’s scale, the answer to it was up to the courts, he said, weeks or months from now.
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