[HN Gopher] The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Ta...
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The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It
Says It Can't
Author : cdrnsf
Score : 78 points
Date : 2026-03-09 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techdirt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techdirt.com)
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| They'd have to beef up the servers to accommodate the extra
| processing and we all know how much RAM costs these day
| b112 wrote:
| _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?
| mandevil wrote:
| 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.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| psadauskas wrote:
| 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
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I can't think of a constructive way to respond to news this dumb.
| Anyone have a silver lining?
| Herring wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| drecked wrote:
| Or Cuba...
|
| Another brilliant humanitarian crisis caused entirely by
| the U.S. for no good reason at all.
| tgv wrote:
| I'm not arguing the USA is a good guy. Just that that
| doesn't make China any better.
| Herring wrote:
| 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.)
| expedition32 wrote:
| 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.
| jaapz wrote:
| 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.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > 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?
| abduhl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Unemployment numbers about to drop like a rock.
| fwipsy wrote:
| 44000000 / 2000 hours/year = 2200 jobs for 1 year. *50k/year
| = $110,000,000
| tocs3 wrote:
| You should add in time for training.
| protimewaster wrote:
| 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.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's complete rubbish because that implies there
| was a plan at all
| stevetron wrote:
| This is like a previous administration trying you re-unite
| children with their families.
| greatgib wrote:
| 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...
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(page generated 2026-03-09 23:01 UTC)