The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't

3/9/2026 at 6:15:51 PM

> meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

Assuming nobody looks at the requirements of the problem to write a single line of code in order to tool up to the task.

by kazinator

3/9/2026 at 6:58:22 PM

CBP says it needs 45 days to build new software before it can start writing checks.

Honestly? It doesn't seem unreasonable if it really is 45 days.

Imagine if they started working on software additions for mass refunds, and the decision went the other way? And they didn't have to refund?

Wouldn't they be wasting money for no reason?

by b112

3/9/2026 at 8:51:17 PM

Then they should have mentioned that in their court filings!

The reason that the tariffs were collected while there was doubts as to their legality is that the US Government promised, in court filings (courts literally marked this as estoppel in a ruling: they are unable to change their mind on it, locked in argument) that they could repay this easily, and so courts allowed them to collect it while they figured out the legality. When they promised this, if it did require software changes, they should have done that then, or else they were lying to courts.

This is why the judges are not giving them any slack here. They promised to courts that this could be done easily, in such a way that they can't change their mind now. This is all very basic tenets of law that even non-lawyers can understand.

by mandevil

3/9/2026 at 9:49:21 PM

They would at least be wasting "their own" (taxpayer) money, instead of punishing random importers with chaotic effects to our entire globalized system of political economy.

by ElevenLathe

3/9/2026 at 9:55:46 PM

How many hours did it take to charge all those illegal tariffs, though? Surely not the 500 years they say it'll take to refund them /s

by psadauskas

3/9/2026 at 6:46:11 PM

They'd have to beef up the servers to accommodate the extra processing and we all know how much RAM costs these day

by arealaccount

3/9/2026 at 6:25:09 PM

> CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

by simonw

3/9/2026 at 6:31:02 PM

Unemployment numbers about to drop like a rock.

by nisegami

3/9/2026 at 6:57:05 PM

44000000 / 2000 hours/year = 2200 jobs for 1 year. *50k/year = $110,000,000

by fwipsy

3/9/2026 at 10:32:07 PM

You should add in time for training.

by tocs3

3/9/2026 at 6:30:39 PM

While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.

I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.

by protimewaster

3/9/2026 at 10:45:44 PM

> While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

No, I disagree. It is actually quite hard to see how this scenario arises without intentional malfeasance. This isn't something that was overlooked, the government was specifically asked in court it they would be able to issue refunds quickly if the tariffs were overturned. The government lied and said they could.

This isn't some surprise thing where we can just forgive these guys in the government for not accounting for the potential need for refunds. They were asked. They lied.

by solid_fuel

3/9/2026 at 8:57:28 PM

When there is no financial data to steal or person to randomly fire, suddenly there is not anymore 20 years old DOGE morons pretending to be able to fix the system overnight...

by greatgib

3/9/2026 at 6:34:03 PM

Well Trump's track record of "No Plan-B" has historically worked out for him pretty well so far. He had ample reason to think the SCOTUS--which has been giving him a green light to act like a god-king up to this point--would have his back on this as well, in which case who cares if his backup plan turned out to be complete rubbish?

by AdmiralAsshat

3/9/2026 at 6:57:52 PM

I wouldn't say it's complete rubbish because that implies there was a plan at all

by fwipsy

3/9/2026 at 6:18:03 PM

I can't think of a constructive way to respond to news this dumb. Anyone have a silver lining?

by josefritzishere

3/9/2026 at 6:22:44 PM

China's GDP (PPP) overtook the US in 2016. It is currently ~30% higher and will reach double by 2035. They haven't dropped bombs on foreign soil in over 40 years.

by Herring

3/9/2026 at 6:27:48 PM

Who cares about a few Uygurs, right? Or the Chinese Seas. Or Tibet and Taiwan. You can say what you want, but China is not a silver lining.

by tgv

3/9/2026 at 7:35:23 PM

Would you rather live next to a domestic abuser or a serial killer? That's the math a lot of countries are doing right now. It's hard for Americans to understand because they've never been invaded or even credibly threatened with invasion. (And yes, the US does plenty of domestic abuse too.)

by Herring

3/9/2026 at 9:32:45 PM

To be brutally honest here: no. Nobody cares.

What people want is stability. Not endless fucking wars.

People in my country don't give a shit about Moses-Jesus. They do care about how much their fuel costs.

by expedition32

3/9/2026 at 7:22:39 PM

Who cares about undocumented immigrants, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Iraq, or Afganistan, or Iraq a second time, or putting Iran into it's current situation by overthrowing a democratically elected government in the 1950s, or Hawaii, or the Virgin Islands, Indigenous people of North America etc etc.

by soperj

3/9/2026 at 8:48:43 PM

I'm not arguing the USA is a good guy. Just that that doesn't make China any better.

by tgv

3/9/2026 at 7:53:51 PM

Or Cuba…

Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by the U.S. for no good reason at all.

by drecked

3/9/2026 at 7:18:23 PM

You're a bit naive if you think China is a peace loving country that wouldn't bomb the living shit out of any opposing nation if they could do so without recourse

Even now they are posturing in their "South-Chinese Sea", or as the Filipino's like to call it, the "West-Phillipine Sea". Also, Taiwan, Hong Kong...

And then we haven't even talked about how nice they are to their own citizens.

China is growing in strength and moving towards a new global world order, and the way Trump is fucking up US supremacy at the moment, China might well succeed.

by jaapz

3/9/2026 at 10:49:24 PM

> And then we haven't even talked about how nice they are to their own citizens.

Oh no, I haven't heard about that lately. What are they doing? Building camps to mass-inter their own citizens? Disappearing people from airports and then lying about where they are being kept? Withholding welfare funds to punish political enemies? Murdering civilians in the street and calling them domestic terrorists? Employing legal threats to force companies to sell technology for domestic mass surveillance?

by solid_fuel

3/9/2026 at 7:16:22 PM

In its court filing, the US government admits that "In addition to refunding the IEEPA duties, CBP must also pay importers interest, as required by law." So one silver lining here is that we (because it is the taxpayers who ultimately pay) will actually pay more than was collected on tariffs once interest is considered.

The second silver lining is that, even if CBP does its job, there is another step where the Trump administration will certainly drag its feet again: "If it is determined upon liquidation or reliquidation that excess moneys have been deposited, such that a refund with interest is due to the importer, CBP certifies the refund and interest amounts to the Department of the Treasury, which then employs its own processes to disburse the certified amounts to the importers of record."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cit.193...

by abduhl

3/9/2026 at 7:07:36 PM

This is like a previous administration trying you re-unite children with their families.

by stevetron