The US government has suffered another defeat in the legal dispute over its tariffs. A judge at the Court of International Trade in New York ruled that importers are entitled to refunds for tariffs already paid that the US Supreme Court recently ruled unlawful. The plaintiff in this specific case was a company from the state of Tennessee.
Citing an emergency law from 1977, President Donald Trump had imposed tariffs on dozens of trading partners bypassing Congress since the start of his second term in office. The Supreme Court declared those tariffs illegal in a landmark decision last month. The judges ruled that the law does not allow the US President to impose tariffs independently. They did not decide whether the government had to pay back customs revenue to importers.
Several companies, such as the US logistics company Fedex, then filed lawsuits against the government with the Court of International Trade in New York in order to obtain a refund of customs duties that had already been paid.
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s ruling, a wave of reclaims of such tariffs was expected. According to calculations by the University of Pennsylvania, the US state budget is around $175 billion. That would correspond to about 2.5 percent of the US budget.
