35 Billion Is Heading Back to Importers. The supply chain math still needs to be calculated.

Most supply chain teams spent the first quarter of 2026 absorbing tariff costs into their models. This week, a portion of those costs started coming back — and the implications for procurement, pricing, and supplier relationships are more complicated than a refund cheque suggests.

The Trump administration is in the process of issuing more than $35.5 billion to importers who successfully filed for tariff refunds after the US Supreme Court found the president's signature economic policy unlawful. The payments are being processed through a new online government portal and will include interest on duties paid across more than 8 million import entries.

The scale of what is ultimately at stake is considerably larger. Up to $166 billion of CBP collections from Trump's tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act are subject to refunds following the Supreme Court's February ruling that Trump overstepped his authority in using the 1977 sanctions law to impose tariffs. After the Supreme Court ruling, Trump imposed a temporary global 10% tariff.

As of May 11, the CAPE portal had validated nearly 87,000 declarations, clearing the way for the Treasury Department to issue payments. Payments for some of the first refund requests started reaching importers earlier than expected.

Why the refund is not a clean reversal

The money flowing back to importers is real. What it does not undo is the cost absorption that happened between the tariffs being imposed and the Supreme Court striking them down. Most companies that paid IEEPA tariffs did not absorb the cost internally. They passed it through, to customers, to suppliers, or into product pricing. The refund lands on the importer's balance sheet. The cost it is refunding has already moved through the supply chain and, in most cases, has already been paid by someone else.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his dissent that the US "may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others." Several Democratic-led states have since called for public disclosure of all refund applications and for the refund mechanism to account for costs passed on to small businesses and consumers.

The compliance dimension adds another layer of complexity. One trade advisory expert noted that the firms that ultimately benefit from the refund process will not be the ones that uploaded the cheapest spreadsheets. They will be the firms that understand customs valuation, tariff stacking, entry reconstruction and sequencing, audit defence, and how to explain to a CFO why a refund opportunity can unexpectedly become a compliance event.

The operational reality for procurement teams

CBP had said in earlier court filings that the first phase of CAPE will not be able to accept claims for more than a third of the import entries at issue. The remaining entries have more complicated circumstances, and customs officials have not specified a schedule for rolling out future phases of the refund programme. For companies that paid tariffs on complex, multi-component import entries, the refund timeline remains open-ended. 

Major importers from carmakers to sportswear companies including Under Armour have said they expect a profit boost from tariff reimbursements. For smaller importers without dedicated trade compliance teams, the process of filing accurate declarations, reconciling entry data, and tracking refund status through a government portal that launched six weeks ago is a significant operational undertaking on top of everything else already running. 

The disruption does not arrive as a port closure or a shipping delay. It arrives as $166 billion moving back through a system that was not built to reverse it, at a pace and in a sequence that no supply chain model currently running has fully priced in.