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Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump said some countries have rejected his request to join a coalition to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan are among the countries that have said they will not participate. (The update) Separately, the Israeli military said it has begun a “limited” ground operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah. (The operation)
2. A federal judge temporarily blocked several vaccine policy decisions made by the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The judge found that the department’s changes to childhood vaccine recommendations were likely carried out improperly, and that Kennedy appointed new members to a vaccine advisory panel without observing proper federal procedures. (The ruling)
3. Cuba reported a nationwide blackout after its energy grid collapsed on Monday, the third such incident in the past four months. The government said the Trump administration’s energy blockade has imperiled its grid. (The blackout)
4. President Trump announced that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been diagnosed with breast cancer, saying the disease is in the early stage and her prognosis is “excellent.” Wiles will continue in her role while she receives treatment. (The diagnosis)
5. Thousands of union workers at the world’s largest meatpacking company went on strike in Colorado. The union claims the company committed unfair labor practices and offered insufficient pay increases. (The strike)

Today’s topic.

Refunds on tariffs. Over the past week, the Trump administration has begun providing initial updates on its plan to reimburse $166 billion in tariffs collected over the past year that the Supreme Court invalidated in February. Approximately 330,000 importers are expected to be eligible for refunds, which must be paid with interest. 

Back up: On February 20, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to strike down President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and other duties issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The ruling did not address whether the U.S. government must pay back tariff revenue it has collected. On March 4, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that companies are entitled to repayment on the IEEPA tariffs and instructed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to immediately begin processing refunds. 

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, thousands of U.S. businesses filed lawsuits seeking reimbursement, but the Trump administration warned that the requests could take over 4.4 million hours to manually process. On March 6, CBP told the judge that it could not immediately comply with his order, and Eaton temporarily suspended it to give them time to prepare a refund system.

On Thursday, Brandon Lord, executive director of CBP’s trade policy and programs department, said the agency will begin testing new software designed to process refund requests in bulk in the upcoming weeks. Eaton called this update “satisfactory progress,” but said the administration must provide another update this week. 

In addition to the lawsuits filed by businesses, consumers have filed class-action suits asking companies that receive refunds to pass those returns onto customers who paid elevated prices while the tariffs were in place. On Wednesday, one such lawsuit was filed against Costco in federal court. “This lawsuit seeks to prevent Costco, the third-largest retailer in the world, from double recovery,” it read. “Costco has made no commitment to return any portion of anticipated tariff refunds to the consumers who bore those costs.” On March 5, the company said it will disburse any refunds it receives through lower prices for its members, adding that it did not pass on the full cost of the tariffs to its customers. Other companies, such as FedEx, said they will issue direct tariff refunds to customers if they are reimbursed. 

Today, we’ll break down the latest on the refunds, with views from the left and right. Then, Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead shares her take.

What the left is saying.

• Many on the left blame conservatives on the Court for creating a chaotic reimbursement process.
• Some argue consumers should receive refunds, too. 
• Others say businesses are unlikely to pass on refunds to their customers. 

In Balls and Strikes, Steve Kennedy argued “the Supreme Court’s conservatives created the tariff refunds ‘mess.’”

“The resolution of the legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s IEEPA tariffs should have been straightforward: After the executive branch imposes sweeping tariffs without lawful authority, someone sues, and the courts, in light of the enormous political and economic stakes, temporarily prevent the tariffs from taking effect as litigation slogs on. Eventually, the Supreme Court issues a final ruling on the merits and finds that Trump lacks the power to institute the tariffs,” Kennedy wrote. “But thanks to the Court’s earlier decision in Trump v. CASA, which effectively prohibited universal injunctions, federal judges did not enjoin the tariffs. Instead, importers had to pay the tariffs for nine months to the tune of $130 billion.”

“Justice Brett Kavanaugh lamented that the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’ He is right, but the time to prevent this mess was at the injunction phase,” Kennedy said. “For years, when lower courts blocked sweeping federal policies using injunctive relief, conservatives would complain of overreach, so long as a Republican was president. Now, when the absence of that relief allows the implementation of unlawful policies, they pivot to the ‘reliance interests’ those policies create. The longer and more harshly the government acts, the more disruptive it would become to stop it, encouraging increasing lawlessness.”

In MS NOW, Ray Brescia said “Americans deserve relief from the costs of Trump’s illegal tariffs — Congress can help.”

“Trump is treating this $175 billion like a bad debt on one of his failed real estate ventures: You can take him to court, but he’ll fight having to pay a penny tooth and nail. What makes this fight different, however, is now he has the full weight and power of the Justice Department behind him, doing his bidding at public expense,” Brescia wrote. “But the administration shouldn’t have the last word on the subject. And Congress shouldn’t sit idly by while the administration treats this money like its own, forcing businesses and taxpayers to go through the trouble and expense of having to claw back what is rightfully theirs.”

“Instead of relying on the administration to reimburse Americans fairly and expeditiously, Congress can create an independent fund capitalized by the billions taken in as illegal tariffs,” Brescia said. “Congress does this sort of thing with some frequency, as in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, for those exposed to the toxic chemicals at the Camp Lejeune military base, and those harmed in the Deepwater Horizon disaster through the Gulf Coast Restoration Trust Fund. While such interventions typically follow a national disaster, here, the disaster for the economy was the president’s illegal tariffs.”

In The Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik wrote “waiting for your tariff refund check? Fugeddaboutit!”

“Asked about the prospects that Americans would be receiving refunds of the illegal tariffs paid since Trump imposed them in April, [Treasury Secretary] Bessent replied with a condescending smirk: ‘I get a feeling the American people won’t see it,’” Hiltzik said. “By not specifying a refund process, the Supreme Court decision left a vacuum that Bessent tried to fill. In his comments, he explained why refunds will be nothing but a dream for the average American — and those comments were chilling… the government is poised to challenge importers’ applications for reimbursement, generating litigation that ‘can be dragged out for weeks, months, years.’”

“What consumers don’t know is how much of the tariffs have been passed down to them. Some sellers decided to eat some or all of the tariffs to keep consumer prices steady. Some may have stocked up on tariff-eligible products ahead of the formal imposition of the levies,” Hiltzik wrote. “Will retailers seek out customers who paid higher prices on products that were tariffed to hand them refunds? None has said that such an eventuality is in the cards, though it might not be surprising to see some businesses use the end of tariffs as a marketing device.”

What the right is saying.

• The right supports a timely refund process, and many contend the government has the power to send the refunds quickly if it wants to.
• Some say the scope of the reimbursements should be limited to importers. 
• Others worry about the high costs to taxpayers if payments are delayed. 

The Washington Post editorial board argued “the stolen money needs to be returned.”

“Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh warned in his dissent… that refunding tariffs would be messy. That’s true: Returning an estimated $175 billion by some estimates to thousands of businesses will be tricky. But that’s a flimsy rationalization for defending an abuse of power by the executive branch,” the board wrote. “The government already said it would. Last year, when this case was being argued in lower courts, attorneys for the Trump administration warned that they would need to refund the money if the tariffs got struck down.”

“The government already has refund procedures for wrongly collected tariffs. Mistakes happen for legal tariffs all the time, and getting the money back is an administrative process that doesn’t require lawsuits,” the board said. “The IRS refunded $461.2 billion to 117.6 million individual income taxpayers in fiscal year 2024. By comparison, Customs and Border Protection’s task is small. If CBP needs to hire some contractors for a few months to handle the one-time surge in refunds, that’s a small price to pay.”

In The Chicago Tribune, Sara Albrecht said “refund the tariffs the right way — not with political math.”

“Some businesses absorbed the tariffs, at least initially, cutting into margins to avoid sudden price hikes. Others passed along some or all of the cost. Some raised prices beyond the tariff itself because working capital costs rose — tariffs must be paid before goods are sold, tightening cash flow and often requiring short-term borrowing,” Albrecht wrote. “There is no single ‘pass-through’ rate. One retailer may have absorbed most of the cost to preserve customer loyalty. Another may have increased prices and still lost sales volume.”

“Tariff refunds should follow the legal payment trail. They should be returned to the importer of record — whether that is a small business directly or a customs broker or carrier clearing goods on its behalf. Those intermediaries can then reconcile accounts with their customers under the contracts that governed those transactions,” Albrecht said. “Some may choose to pass refunds directly to customers. Others may offer promotions, sales or price rollbacks. Some may reinvest in hiring or restore delayed raises. Others may do nothing at all because their overall costs — including financing, fees and lost volume — exceeded what they were ever able to pass along.”

In Cato, Scott Lincicome, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, and Chad Smitson wrote “the government can’t refund Trump’s illegal tariffs as easily as it collected them.”

“Unfortunately, the companies’ fight may just be getting started. If so, the drawn-out process will likely deny many American firms the money that the government owes them and will likely cost taxpayers billions of additional dollars in interest,” the authors said. “[Customs and Border Protection] said that it can’t stop charging IEEPA tariffs on imports for which duty liability has not yet been finalized (i.e., ‘liquidated’)... In other words, importers of the 20.1 million entries that remain unliquidated as of March 4 may still be charged IEEPA tariffs.”

“The implementation challenges that CBP says it now faces are predictable technical and logistical issues that the agency should have considered months ago, especially since the government lost the IEEPA tariff case in every court that heard it,” the authors wrote. “The agency’s predicament is a problem of the government’s own making, and we seriously doubt that American importers or taxpayers would be granted the leniency that the agency is now requesting from the court.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• Tariff reimbursements are going to be a mess.
• The government will try to delay and argue against repayments, and may be successful.
• Congress’s dereliction of duty created this predicament.

Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead: The Supreme Court did not indicate what should be done with improperly collected revenue, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his dissent from the Court’s February decision invalidating the majority of President Trump’s tariffs. I disagreed with a lot of Kavanaugh’s historical arguments about presidential authority, but he was right about one thing: The Supreme Court created a giant mess.

As soon as the Learning Resources decision came down, thousands of lawsuits from importers followed — as well as some consumer class-action suits. Nearly all of these suits are being funneled through the Court of International Trade (CIT), which assigned one of its members, Judge Richard Eaton, as the sole arbiter of these tariff cases.

Since the Supreme Court didn’t indicate a framework through which the government should seek to provide relief, it was entirely possible that each importer would need to fight for a refund individually. But then, in one sweeping order in a nondescript tariff case — notable only because it asked for emergency relief — Judge Eaton ordered the federal government to issue refunds to nearly all importers who were impacted by Trump’s sweeping tariffs. During the hearing for that case, Judge Eaton told the federal government, “I believe that there will be no chaos associated with the provision of these refunds and that it will not result in a mess.” 

I don’t know why Eaton was so optimistic. A lot of the pundits above are tacitly optimistic, too, focusing their discussion on whether consumers will receive refunds. But at this rate, some of the companies who paid duties to the government might be lucky to get refunds at all. President Trump himself seems set on dragging out the process, saying the administration will be in court “for the next five years” fighting the refunds. His stance indicates what the federal government’s response to the mandated refunds will be: delay and argue.

At a first glance, the response looks like compliance. Following Judge Eaton’s March 4 order, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a four-step plan for processing refunds called the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system, which it says will be operational within 45 days. But when you look more closely, you can see the government’s obstinance clear as day. For one, the CAPE system seems designed to place more burdens on the importers filing for refunds than on the government — meaning it will likely keep some importers from getting the refunds they’re entitled to. Furthermore, the federal government has until May 6 to challenge Eaton’s order in federal court, and I fully expect it to do so. In fact, depending on the legal basis for the challenge, I think it’s possible — even likely — that the government will succeed at the Federal Circuit Court, potentially setting up another battle at the Supreme Court. And finally, even if the refunds proceed, the process may still require years to complete.

That’s part one: delay. As Scott Lincicome, Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and Chad Smitson argued for The Cato Institute, CAPE requires importers to jump through various hoops that they’re not necessarily equipped to jump through. And those hoops actually come from CBP reinventing the wheel. The agency has issued refunds for improperly collected tariffs before, as recently as 2018, using automated processes and procedures for handling larger refunds. It stands to reason that CBP should be able to use its preexisting systems for the court-ordered IEEPA refunds — even if the sheer scale of those refunds meant they’d take longer. The fact that CAPE creates these additional burdens, then, signals the federal government intends to keep as much of the illegally collected duties as possible.

Now for part two: argue. Here, Judge Eaton’s swift broad rulings may have played right into the administration’s hands. Eaton’s order came down in the tariff case Atmus Filtration Inc. v. United States (2026), which ended up on his desk because it asked for emergency relief to prevent CBP from finalizing import payments including the improper tariffs. But Eaton held the first hearing in this tariff case even after the litigants tried to withdraw their emergency request, which is odd. Then, rather than issuing a decision specific to the Atmus Filtration case, he demanded broad refunds to all importers. In that order, Eaton explicitly declared that the CIT is exempt from the prohibition on national injunctions the Supreme Court laid out in its 2024 decision in Trump v. CASA — because the CIT was not established by the Judiciary Act of 1789, but by a separate 1980 law. Since the CASA opinion focused on the authority granted to federal courts by the 1789 law, the CIT wasn’t necessarily included within it. Eaton further interpreted decisions from the Supreme Court to acknowledge the CIT’s sole authority over matters of international trade.

I don’t think Eaton’s argument holds water. The government is almost certain to appeal his decision, likely on the grounds that Eaton’s order actually should be bound by CASA, under which the broad refunds would be improper. The government successfully made a similar appeal when the CIT blocked Trump’s tariffs in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump (2025), the initial tariff case. Even though the Circuit Court agreed with the CIT that Trump’s tariffs were illegal, it still voided the CIT’s injunction against the tariffs because of CASA. With this precedent already drawing a line around the CIT’s universal injunction power, I seriously doubt that the same court will be convinced by Eaton’s reasoning here. 

Eaton’s order was undoubtedly intended to provide redress to the U.S. importers who suffered financial losses from illegally imposed duties. And his quick, sweeping actions are also likely driven by urgency surrounding the building costs of dragging out the process: The longer the government delays its refunds to importers, the more interest accrues on those refunds. The Cato Institute estimates that, for every month refunds are delayed, the U.S. government will have to pay an additional $700 million in interest. By that logic, Eaton’s demands for a speedy, universal resolution to the refund question is also a result of his vested interest in limiting costs on the U.S. taxpayer.

In that sense, I’m glad Eaton takes his duty as an arbiter of justice seriously. But good intentions don’t necessarily make good judicial practice, and conferring additional authority upon oneself as a judge — or attempting to sidestep apparent restraints on one’s authority — is almost certainly bad judicial practice. Good intentions pave the road towards judicial overreach, slowly amassing power in the hands of appointed judges rather than elected officials. That’s one of the implicit points Justice Amy Coney Barrett made in her majority opinion in CASA: It’s the judge’s job to act with the restraint appropriate to his role, even in the face of unrestrained, inappropriate action from the executive.

Behind all these logistical issues is the fundamental culprit of much of our modern political woes: We only have the imperial executive and the imperial judiciary because we have an impotent Congress. The federal government issued tariffs using shaky legal authority, and now is fighting tooth and nail to avoid paying the refunds the courts have said it owes. The federal courts are, similarly, overstretching their authority in their attempts to curtail executive power — and in so doing, I fear they’re also drawing out the process of giving plaintiffs actual relief.

If Congress were willing to do its job and reassert its power of the purse, it could certainly create legislation mandating straightforward processes for refunds. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly clear that Congress is unwilling to do anything other than fight over funding the government itself — leaving the judicial and the executive branches to fight their own entrenched power struggle, with U.S. companies and consumers in the no man’s land between them.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: My question is regarding the officer who was acquitted in the Uvalde school shooting. Could you discuss the specific charges and the reasoning for the dismissal? Were the initial charges an overreach?

— Ryan from New York, NY

Tangle: In January, Uvalde school district officer Adrian Gonzales was acquitted of all criminal charges for his actions during the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers. Gonzales was charged with 29 counts of child endangerment — one for each of the 19 children killed and 10 others who were injured but survived. This was the first criminal trial against an officer involved in the widely criticized delayed police response to the shooting.

After a heavily armed 18-year-old entered Robb Elementary, 376 armed guards responded to the scene. The combined force then waited over an hour before confronting the gunman. Uvalde Police initially claimed that a school resource officer confronted the shooter before he entered the building, but that statement was later retracted. Once at the school, police officers waited for more than an hour before storming the building. One mother on the scene had been handcuffed for accosting the police to act, then convinced officers to remove her handcuffs, scaled a fence, entered the school on her own, and removed her two children from the school.

Gonzales was the first to arrive at Robb Elementary following reports of an active shooter. According to multiple accounts, he waited several minutes before entering the school and evacuating some of the children, never encountering the shooter. Prosecutors argued that Gonzales negligently waited three and a half minutes to enter and failed to adhere to his active-shooter training. The defense said that he assessed the situation for only two minutes before safely evacuating children and was being scapegoated for the failures of the entire department.

The acquittal is a mixed bag. Charging Gonzales with child endangerment certainly seems fair — rifle shots were ringing out when he arrived at the scene, and he did not do what he was supposed to do in that situation and move towards gunfire without waiting for backup. If he had acted more decisively, more lives plausibly could have been saved. However, this particular legal response seems disproportionate; rather than charging the first individual on the scene with culpability for all the killed and injured children, the officers who subsequently arrived also should have faced consequences for their negligence. The Texas Tribune described the combined force that waited outside Robb Elementary as “larger than the garrison that defended the Alamo,” yet Gonzales was the only officer individually charged with a crime.

That said, Gonzales’s case is not the only legal action taken following the shooting. Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo has been charged with child endangerment, and three Border Patrol agents have been sued to compel their testimony in Arredondo’s case. Additionally, families have filed civil lawsuits against the state, the social media company Meta, the maker of the rifle used in the shooting, and the maker of the video game Call of Duty — and the town of Uvalde has already settled with the families for $2 million.

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Under the radar.

This week, the U.S. Postal Service is expected to notify Congress that it is on track to run out of money in less than a year and request emergency actions to stabilize its finances. Postmaster General David Steiner will reportedly ask a ‌House Oversight subcommittee to approve higher stamp prices, additional loans, and revised investment strategies. According to Steiner, the agency could move to end six-day-a-week deliveries, close branches in remote locations, or raise first-class mail stamp prices without urgent measures. The Government Accountability Office is also expected to advise lawmakers that addressing the Postal Service’s business model is critical to avoid “billions in new annual expenses for retiree health care, likely in 2031.” Reuters has the story.

Numbers.

• 40–80%. The range in percent completion of four components of software being developed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to issue tariff refunds, according to CBP’s Brandon Lord. 
• 53 million. The approximate number of entries for goods that were subject to duties struck down by the Supreme Court in February. 
• 2,000. The approximate number of companies that have filed lawsuits seeking refunds.
• $700 million. The estimated amount that the U.S. government will owe in interest payments for each month it does not refund importers, according to a Cato Institute analysis. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about the short-term funding bill.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the ad in the free version for The Pour Over.
• Nothing to do with politics: How fast can you scroll?
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,381 readers responded to our multi-select survey on the latest spate of violent attacks in the U.S. with 53% saying more counter-terrorism resources would have prevented the attacks. “Until societies put in place some type of laws and structures to severely discourage and punish religious backed extremism, this will continue,” one respondent said. “By far, the best prevention is to stop antagonizing the Middle East,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Exactly three weeks after the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team defeated Canada in the gold medal game, the U.S. men’s Paralympic squad repeated the feat, beating Canada 6–2 in Milan, Italy, on Sunday. This time, however, the United States was the juggernaut, claiming its third-straight Paralympic gold medal and becoming the first hockey team — Olympic or Paralympic — to win five back-to-back titles (including non-Paralympic competitions). “This team is so special. We love each other,” U.S. defenseman Jack Wallace said. “It was unbelievable. I love these guys so much.” NBC Olympics has the story.