Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by the U.S. for no good reason at all.
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.
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...
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.
kazinator•3h ago
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•2h ago
b112•2h ago
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?
mandevil•29m ago
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.