documents<\/a> from US Customs and Border Protection. Currently, around $165 billion (\u20ac143bn) has been collected in “Liberation Day” tariffs, as reported by Financial Times. <\/p>\nHowever, almost $29bn (\u20ac25.1bn) worth of potential refunds is still being reviewed by trade authorities, whereas approximately $1.6bn (\u20ac1.4bn) has not been processed yet due to importers not submitting their banking details. <\/p>\n
Back in April this year, a long-anticipated refund portal had been launched for US businesses to start claiming refunds on Trump’s “unlawful” tariffs. <\/p>\n
At the time, around $127bn (\u20ac110bn) in eligible claims including interest had already been filed, out of the $166bn (\u20ac143bn) worth of tariffs paid by over 330,000 importers across more than 53 million shipments according to AP. <\/p>\n
This was following a February US Supreme Court ruling stating that Trump had acted beyond the Congress’ tax-setting authority and had no constitutional authority to impose these import taxes. <\/p>\n
The “Liberation Day” tariffs had originally been imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law giving the president power to “regulate” trade in cases of emergencies \u2014 the same authority the Supreme Court found did not extend to imposing tariffs. <\/p>\n
The act does not provide a specific definition or detailed list of what exactly constitutes an emergency. <\/p>\n
Instead, the President is granted broad discretion to declare a national emergency, under 50 U.S.C. \u00a7 1701, with the statute only stating that the emergency powers may be used to deal with any “unusual and extraordinary threat.” <\/p>\n
These threats only have to meet vague categories such as threatening US national security or economy and being a foreign source. <\/p>\n
Related <\/p>\n
Widespread domestic outrage at Trump’s tariffs <\/p>\n
The current Trump administration has heavily relied on tariffs as a core economic and leverage strategy, which has led to significant outcry, especially among domestic US businesses. <\/p>\n
This is because tariffs are paid mainly by importers and domestic US businesses once goods reach customs, rather than by overseas exporters and foreign governments. <\/p>\n
This has placed a huge burden on these businesses in the last couple of years, due to them also having to pass on higher costs caused by these taxes to consumers through a surge in retail prices. <\/p>\n
Some companies like Amazon, which has already received around $600 million (\u20ac519.7m) in refunds, have also decided to use a portion of the funds for customer relief and to subsidise lower store prices. <\/p>\n
However, this is entirely up to company discretion and is not legally mandated under US customs law. <\/p>\n
Despite these massive refunds, Trump has not been deterred, having recently imposed a 50% tariff on Canada and also implementing new tariffs on 60 trading partners due to claims of not dealing with forced labour adequately. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump’s government has paid back around $100 billion (\u20ac86.6bn) in “Liberation Day” tariffs to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[32652,38,8,32650,9,127,7,32651],"class_list":["post-62059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-stories","tag-customs-officials","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-liberation-day","tag-news","tag-tariffs","tag-top-stories","tag-us-customs-and-border-protection"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/117049943947956512","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}