Trump’s Global Tariffs Face Legal Scrutiny: 4 Million ‘Man Hours’ Needed for Refunds Without Automation, Court Documents Reveal

The Trump administration has informed a federal judge of its inability to comply with a court directive to initiate the refund of approximately $166 billion. This follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision declaring President Donald Trump’s global emergency tariffs as an unauthorized and illegal use of taxing powers, which are constitutionally reserved for Congress.

The Court of International Trade is now inundated with lawsuits from both large and small importers and businesses seeking refunds for the unlawful duties they were charged. Consequently, one judge is beginning to navigate the complexities of these cases in what is being referred to as the post-Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump era.

Despite the urgency, the Trump administration is not yet ready to expedite the refund process.

Brandon Lord, the Executive Director of Trade Programs at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, declared under oath to Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade that managing the significant volume of refunds necessitates the establishment of “automated controls.” He explained that without this technology, completing the task manually would require over 4 million hours of labor.

Judge Eaton, appointed by Bill Clinton, issued an order emphasizing that “all importers of record” who were impacted by Trump’s tariffs are entitled to the benefits of the Supreme Court’s decision, which nullified those tariffs.

Some of the justices, including one of Trump’s appointees, would have greenlit the tariffs, even though the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not use the word tariffs and had never been used for that purpose.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh arguably created a roadmap for Trump to use other tariff authorities, and the president promptly did so after the majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts dealt its heavy blow.

Trump called the decision by Roberts and two of his own appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch, an “embarrassment to their families” for having joined with the liberal justices against him.

It certainly made for an awkward State of the Union, during which Barrett, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Elena Kagan looked on as Trump complained of the “unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court.”

Even as Trump’s alternative tariffs are already threatened by a lawsuit from state attorneys general, the burning question continues to be about the real-world consequences of Trump’s supreme legal failure.

For his part, Eaton “directed” CBP to “liquidate […] entries without regard to the IEEPA duties” and told the government that “any liquidated entries for which liquidation is not final shall be reliquidated without regard to those duties.”

The Trump administration has responded that it “is not able to comply” with the order because it faces “an unprecedented volume of refunds” — “330,000 importers have made a total of over 53 million entries in which they have deposited or paid duties” — and its “existing administrative procedures and technology are not well suited to a task of this scale[.]”

Worse yet, the manual version of that task would span 4.4 million “man hours” and bury the agency’s staff, the administration said.

“Once the review of an entry is complete and any manual duty calculations completed, it takes an [Import Specialist] IS or [Entry Specialist] ES approximately 5 minutes to process an individual refund, including amending, liquidating and certifying the refund for each entry. The refund processing for the 53,173,939 entries with IEEPA duties will require 4,431,161 man hours for CBP to complete,” the filing said. “It is not feasible for CBP to divert all IS and ES personnel to processing IEEPA duty refunds on a full-time basis with no time off.”

Claiming it would “severely” disrupt the agency and hamper “vital national security functions” to have to operate on Eaton’s schedule, CBP complained it “has never been ordered to, nor has it attempted to, process a volume of refunds anywhere near the volume of total entries and Entry Summary lines on which IEEPA duties have been deposited.”

The good news, according to Lord, is that he thinks a “new” functionality in CBP’s systems could be “ready for use in 45 days” in a “process will require minimal submission from importers” and that the combined “automated controls” will end with electronic refunds from the U.S. Treasury.

“CBP is confident that it can develop and implement new ACE functionality that will streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments on an importer basis, rather than issuing 53,173,939 separate entry- specific refunds with multiple payments going to the same importer,” the declaration said.

Later Friday, the judge said that he heard the administration’s issues and “suspended” his order “to the extent that it directs immediate compliance,” perhaps staving off an appeal.