100 Billion in Tariffs, Nothing Back for Americans

tags: trump, tariffs, consumers, economy

A president tells Fox News his economic policy has been incredible while the Treasury writes $100 billion in checks to corporations.

"Tariffs have been incredible. We've taken in hundreds of billions of dollars. Supreme Court gave us a little shot, but we're allowed to do it in a different manner."

- President Donald Trump, Fox News interview, August 5, 2026

The Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's most sweeping tariffs in February. The ruling declared the International Emergency Economic Powers Act an invalid basis for the levies. That should have been a policy reversal. Instead, it became a corporate windfall.

According to a Tuesday filing in the U.S. Court of International Trade, the Trump administration has now refunded approximately $100 billion of the roughly $166 billion collected under the "Liberation Day" tariffs. The refunds are being disbursed to importers through a system called CAPE, launched by Customs and Border Protection in late April. Nearly $129 billion in potential and certified refunds have been accepted for processing. About $100 billion of that has been completed and sent to the Treasury for disbursement.

Translation: the government collected $166 billion in taxes that it had no legal authority to impose, passed the cost on to American shoppers, and is now returning the money to the companies who absorbed it at the wholesale level.

The mechanics of how this works matter less than the outcome. When the tariffs were in effect, importers paid the duties at the port. Those costs were baked into retail prices. A consumer buying a PlayStation console, a pair of Nikes, or a child's toy at Five Below was effectively paying the tariff at checkout, even though the legal liability sat with the importing company.

The Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA never authorized the tariffs in the first place. Federal Judge Richard Eaton ordered that the collected tariffs be refunded. But the refund goes to the entity that paid the tariff at the border, not the person who paid the markup at the register. The legal chain ends at the corporate importer.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters in February that the tariff rebates would be the "ultimate corporate welfare." He was not being sarcastic. He was making a prediction. And so far, he has been right.

Amazon has received roughly $600 million in tariff refunds. CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company would "automatically issue reimbursements to consumers" under a limited set of circumstances, and that in many cases the company had "largely absorbed those costs rather than pass them on." The credibility of that claim is currently being tested in a class action lawsuit filed against Amazon in May, which argues the company's refusal to seek broader refunds was a deliberate effort to curry favor with the White House.

FedEx and UPS both pledged to pass tariff refunds back to customers. These were companies whose core business involves shipping the very goods that were taxed. Their customers were literally the end recipients of every price increase.

Sony received 80 billion yen in tariff refunds, reported a 37 percent year-over-year increase in operating income, and faced a class action from PlayStation owners alleging a "double recovery windfall" from raising prices to cover tariffs and then collecting the refund. Sony has not confirmed whether it plans to return anything to customers.

Five Below reported a 22.9 percent year-over-year increase in net sales to $4.76 billion in 2025. A consumer from New York named Tyasia Johns filed a class action in July alleging the company passed the IEEPA tariff costs to shoppers and is keeping the government refund. "The money that Defendant's customers paid as a result of the inflated prices related to the IEEPA tariffs rightfully belongs to Plaintiff and the Class," the complaint reads.

Nintendo filed a motion explicitly stating it would not pass on tariff refunds to consumers who paid more for the Switch 2 console, arguing the money they paid "represents the purchase price of the goods they wanted and received."

The distinction between "absorbing costs" and "passing costs" is one of the oldest debates in economics. Empirical research has overwhelmingly shown that the bulk of import taxes are borne by U.S. importers and consumers. A study from New York Fed economists confirmed Americans were footing the bill. A Harris Poll from March found that 72 percent of respondents agreed tariffs had hurt the economy.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already rebuilding the tariff architecture using different legal authorities to circumvent the IEEPA ruling. Those new tariffs are already facing their own lawsuits, including a 25-state coalition lawsuit heading to the Supreme Court. Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that "we are anyway, regardless if we have the law."

More than 330,000 importers paid IEEPA tariffs across over 53 million entries. The CAPE system has so far processed 252,496 refund declarations covering more than 25 million entries. The operation is not finished. There is still roughly $66 billion in refunds to distribute.

The total number of consumers affected runs into the hundreds of millions. None of them have a CAPE account. None of them can file a refund declaration with Customs and Border Protection. Their only path to recovery is through class action litigation against the companies that pocketed the difference, and even then, the legal standard is not automatic. Courts will have to determine whether prices actually rose because of the tariffs, by how much, and whether the companies would have raised prices anyway.

That is not the path to restitution. It is the path to attrition.

There is a deeper pattern here. When Trump carved out exemptions from the tariffs, they were not tied to consumer hardship. They went to industries that bankrolled his campaigns or gave him personal gifts. The refund architecture mirrors the same logic: money flows to the entities with the legal paperwork, the compliance teams, and the lobbyists. The average person who paid $8 more for a console or $3 more for a pair of shoes gets nothing unless they hire a lawyer and hope a class action settles before it gets dismissed.

Trump called the Supreme Court ruling a "little shot." From his perspective, the shot was that the government has to return the money to companies. What he does not acknowledge is that the government collected the money from people who never authorized it.

The American consumer is not a party to the tariff refund. They are its source.