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

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/09/the-government-told-courts-it-could-easily-refund-unlawful-tariffs-now-it-says-it-cant/

60•cdrnsf•2h ago

Comments

kazinator•2h ago

> 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.

arealaccount•1h ago

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

b112•1h ago

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?

josefritzishere•2h ago

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

Herring•2h ago

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.

tgv•2h ago

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.

soperj•1h ago

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, etc etc.

drecked•46m ago

Or Cuba…

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

Herring•1h ago

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.)

jaapz•1h ago

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.

abduhl•1h ago

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...

simonw•2h ago

> 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.

nisegami•2h ago

Unemployment numbers about to drop like a rock.

fwipsy•1h ago

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

protimewaster•2h ago

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.

AdmiralAsshat•2h ago

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?

fwipsy•1h ago

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

stevetron•1h ago

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

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