Loading ...Trump Admin Says It Can’t Comply With Order To Issue Tariff Refunds
The Trump administration can’t immediately comply with a court order to issue tariff refunds, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official.
Processing the “unprecedented volume of refunds” would require work that steers personnel away from “responsibilities that serve to mitigate imminent threats to national security and economic security,” Trade Programs Directorate Executive Director Brandon Lord told the court in an affidavit filed Friday morning.
The government has collected approximately $166 billion in IEEPA duties and estimated duty deposits as of Wednesday, according to the affidavit. Existing procedures and technology “are not well suited to a task of this scale,” Lord wrote, noting processing all of the “53,173,939 entries with IEEPA duties will require 4,431,161 man hours for CBP to complete.”