The Supreme Court ruled in February that some of Trump's tariffs were illegal, and U.S. businesses are now collecting more than $160 billion in government refunds. Consumers, who paid higher prices because of those same illegal tariffs, are mostly getting nothing. Sit with that for a second.
A Wheelchair, $3,500 in Illegal Tariff Costs, and a Very Patient Woman in Tampa
Sarah Alonzo needed a new wheelchair. Hers had finally given out, so she bought a powered, lightweight model that folds, fits in most vehicles, and weighs about 75 pounds. Perfect chair. One problem: it's made in China, she bought it when tariffs on Chinese goods sat at a sky-high 145%, and she ended up paying an extra $3,500 because of it.
As NPR reports, Alonzo paid that surcharge to UPS, which imported the chair. UPS, in turn, paid the tariff to the federal government. Now the Supreme Court has ruled those tariffs were illegal, the federal government is reimbursing UPS, and Alonzo wants her money back. She received an email from UPS saying her refund is being processed. That was about a month ago. She's still waiting.
"It'd be nice to update me," she told NPR's Stephan Bisaha, "'cause I sure would like that money. It would be very useful right now, considering how expensive everything is now, a year later." She's not wrong. And her situation is actually one of the better ones.
Shipping Companies Have to Pay You Back. Retailers Really, Really Don't.
Here is where the story splits into two very different realities, depending on who you bought from. Terence Lau, dean of Syracuse University's College of Law, explained the logic to NPR: shipping companies like UPS, FedEx, and DHL explicitly billed customers for tariff costs as separate line items. If the import tariff was $100, they charged you $100. Now that the government is refunding that $100 to the carrier, the carrier has to give it back to you, or they're sitting on your money with no legal right to it. Lau called it a pretty open-and-shut unjust enrichment lawsuit if they don't.
UPS, FedEx, and DHL all say they are returning the money to customers. UPS says the process takes up to three months from when they receive the government refund. So if you got a package with an explicit tariff surcharge on it, there's a real chance some money is coming your way eventually.
But if you just bought something at a store or online retailer that cost more because of tariffs? That's a completely different situation, and the answer is almost certainly no.
The Money Is Baked Into the Cake and You're Not Getting a Slice
Most retailers didn't list tariffs as a separate charge. They just raised prices. Which means, as Lau told NPR, the tax got "stirred into the batter" and once it's cooked into the cake, you can't separate it out ingredient by ingredient. Retailers genuinely may not be able to calculate how much of any individual purchase was attributable to tariff costs. That's the argument, anyway.
Michael Ettlinger, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, has a blunter read on the whole situation. He told NPR that consumers and businesses shared the cost of tariffs on the way in, but businesses are the ones keeping the refund on the way out. His summary: "It's all just a giant transfer from consumers to corporations, which, you can't really design a worse tax than that."
Some retailers are doing the right thing, at least nominally. Walmart says it will use tariff refunds to lower prices. Costco and Nintendo are both facing class-action lawsuits from shoppers demanding direct refunds. Whether those suits go anywhere is another question entirely.
The Part Everyone Keeps Burying in the Middle of the Story
Ettlinger told NPR something that deserves to be repeated loudly and often: "It's important to keep an eye on what the real sin here is, which is that the government imposed illegal tariffs."
The Trump administration did not impose tariffs that turned out to be economically questionable, or politically unpopular, or mildly overreaching. The Supreme Court ruled they were illegal. Full stop. American consumers paid elevated prices on goods across the economy because the executive branch decided to impose tariffs it did not have the legal authority to impose.
The businesses that passed those costs on to consumers are now being made whole by the government. The consumers who absorbed those costs are, in most cases, getting nothing. And the administration that caused all of this has paid no meaningful political price for it.
What You Can Actually Do Right Now
If you paid an explicit tariff surcharge on a shipping invoice from UPS, FedEx, or DHL, contact them. They have acknowledged the obligation to refund those charges and say they are working through it. Patience is required, but there is a legal baseline here.
If you bought things at retailers that were more expensive because of tariffs, the realistic answer is that you are probably not getting that money back. You can watch the class-action suits against companies like Costco and Nintendo, but class-action resolutions take years and often result in coupons worth less than the postage to mail them.
And if you are Sarah Alonzo, sitting in Tampa in a wheelchair you paid $3,500 extra for because of tariffs a federal court later declared illegal, the answer is: UPS says check's in the mail. Roughly.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is all very complicated. That the money flowed through so many hands, got stirred into so many prices, became so thoroughly distributed through the economy, that there's simply no practical way to get it back to the people who actually paid it. And you know what? For a lot of it, that's technically true. The mechanism genuinely doesn't exist to undo two years of inflated retail prices line item by line item.
But let's not pretend the complication is accidental. The same government that cheerfully collected those tariff payments for two years, that had no trouble running the money in one direction, suddenly finds the infrastructure to run it back only as far as the corporate balance sheet. The money stops at the loading dock. Consumers who paid higher prices on everything from electronics to medical equipment to groceries are told the math is just too hard. The math was never too hard when the bill was going the other way.
This is the tariff story in miniature. A policy sold to American workers as protection turned out to be a wealth transfer disguised as economic nationalism. The Supreme Court eventually said so. The refunds confirm it. And the woman in Tampa who paid $3,500 extra for a wheelchair she needs to leave her house is still waiting for a check while UPS processes its nine-figure government reimbursement. That's the whole story. Everything else is just the batter.
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