By Amelia Twyman | D.C. Bureau | Gov & Politics
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has failed to refund more than $145 billion in tariffs that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unlawful, a pair of U.S. Senate Democrats said in a Wednesday letter to the administration’s chief of customs.
Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward Markey of Massachusetts demanded that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott pay out refunds to small businesses for the tariffs that the court later determined President Donald Trump was not actually empowered to set.
In their letter, the senators condemned what they called the administration’s continuous efforts to complicate and dodge the refund process and sought full compensation for all importers who together paid roughly $166 billion in tariff taxes under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Small businesses “deserve better, and the CBP needs to answer for this debacle,” they wrote.
President Donald Trump aggressively placed tariffs on countries across the globe early in his second term, making the import taxes a centerpiece of his economic agenda.
But the U.S. Supreme Court found Trump’s stack of global tariffs, which he began implementing in early 2025, to be illegal in a February ruling, saying that his use of the emergency tariff act exceeded his powers as president.
Soon after,the U.S. Court for International Trade instructed CBP to issue refunds to the businesses that had borne the costs.
But according to court documents filed May 26, the Trump administration has refunded only about $20.6 billion of the tax money, while another roughly $85 billion remains in the processing stage, leaving more than $60 billion that is not even in the process of being returned.
“That means tens of billions of dollars unlawfully collected from American businesses remain in government hands months after the courts ordered their return,” Markey and Wyden wrote.
Markey is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, and Wyden holds the same position on the Finance Committee, which sets tax policy.
An ongoing price to pay
Many small business owners struggled under the weight of Trump’s tariffs while they were in effect, forced to raise prices, lay off employees and give up hopes of expansion to offset the costs.
Now, they are still dealing with financial pressures as they wait for repayment from an administration that has, in Markey and Wyden’s words, “slow-rolled implementation of the refund process from the outset.”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the administration took weeks to announce a refund procedure, the senators wrote.
CBP eventually settled on a new claims tool called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, or CAPE, for the roughly 330,000 importers who paid tariffs to submit refund requests. The system went live in April.
The lawmakers also pointed to Trump administration claims that some businesses may need to pursue individualized claims through litigation in order to receive tariff refunds, a process that could take up to years to settle.
“This entire episode raises serious questions about whether the Administration is intentionally slowing the refund process in order to retain access to unlawfully collected funds for as long as possible,” they wrote in their letter.
The senators included a list of refund-related questions for CBP in their letter and requested that the agency send written responses by June 24.
A spokesperson for CBP acknowledged a request for comment Thursday, but said they could not guarantee a response in time for publication.
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