The Trump administration has refunded approximately $100 billion in tariff revenue to importers, customs officials reported to the US Court of International Trade on August 5, 2026, according to the Financial Times. That figure represents 60% of the $165 billion total collected under Donald Trump's "liberation day" tariffs, which the US Supreme Court struck down in February 2026 (The Guardian).

The Supreme Court held that the President lacks authority to impose any tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the statute the administration had invoked to levy the duties. IEEPA is a law originally designed to give the president tools to respond to national security emergencies, such as freezing foreign assets. The Court's ruling meant the administration had to begin returning money to companies that had paid the tariffs. Progress has been gradual: by July 14, 2026, $81 billion had been refunded. By June 2026, the administration was still resisting a court order requiring refund of the full $166 billion collected (New York Times).

More than 900 companies have sued the US over the tariff regime, with potential refunds that could total more than $160 billion (Financial Times). FedEx is among the corporate plaintiffs, having filed suit with the Court of International Trade seeking tariff refunds (Financial Times). America's small businesses, however, were left out of the administration's refund process (Financial Times).

The Court of International Trade has taken a broad view of who has standing, meaning who is allowed to bring a claim. In Slip Op. 25-66, the court held that suffering economic injury from a tariff does not require being the direct importer of record or paying Customs directly (CIT). That expansive approach has opened the door to refund claims from a wide range of affected parties, not just importers.

The fiscal backdrop adds to the pressure. The US federal deficit reached $1.37 trillion in the first nine months of the fiscal year, up 2% from the same period in 2025. The refund obligations, layered onto an already widening deficit, sharpen questions about how the Treasury will absorb the outflow even as the administration attempts to replace the lost revenue stream.

In July 2026, Trump imposed a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries to replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire. The new duties range between 10% and 12.5% and apply to countries including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China, and the EU's 27 member states. The administration grounded these tariffs in Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law historically used to respond to specific unfair trade practices by foreign countries. The administration says the new tariffs target countries it believes engage in forced labor (The Guardian).

A coalition of 25 US states sued the administration over the new tariffs, calling them a pretext for replacing the import taxes struck down by the Supreme Court. The states asked the Court of International Trade to halt the tariffs, declare them unlawful, and order refunds of duties already collected. Their complaint argues the tariffs on 59 countries and the EU cover 99.4% of US imports. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the administration, "after losing at the Supreme Court in February, was once again trying to illegally raise taxes on families and businesses with a new round of tariffs" (The Guardian).

The broader context here is one of statutory whack-a-mole between the executive and the judiciary. The IEEPA ruling in February did not merely invalidate a discrete set of duties; it removed the primary legal vehicle the administration had used to impose sweeping unilateral tariffs without congressional approval. The pivot to Section 301 stretches that framework to cover what amounts to a near-universal duty regime, rather than the targeted trade-remedy actions it was historically used for. The 25-state coalition's argument that the new tariffs cover 99.4% of imports is designed to press exactly that point: that the Section 301 invocation is a legal relabeling exercise rather than a substantive response to forced labor.

The refund trajectory also bears watching. The pace has accelerated, from $81 billion on July 14 to $100 billion on August 5. At that rate, the remaining $65 billion could be processed within months, assuming no further legal obstruction. Yet the administration's documented reluctance to comply with the full refund order, as recently as June, suggests the tail end of the process may be less smooth than the trajectory implies. The exclusion of small businesses from the refund mechanism creates a parallel track of potential claims and political pressure that the current figures do not capture.

For trade practitioners, the key questions now cluster around the Court of International Trade's handling of the 25-state challenge. If the court grants an injunction on the Section 301 tariffs, importers face a scenario in which both the old IEEPA regime and its replacement are simultaneously in legal limbo, with billions in duties collected under both frameworks subject to refund demands. The forced-labor framing of the Section 301 invocation may also face evidentiary scrutiny, given its application to a broad swath of developed economies where forced labor is not the central trade dispute.