Uncommon Knowledge: Trump’s Zombie Tariffs Don’t Die, They Mutate

Have President Donald Trump’s tariffs succeeded or failed? What would that look like? Does it matter? His "Liberation Day" tariffs, launched on April 2, 2025, have died legally and kept walking anyway. The Supreme Court killed them on February 20 this year, saying that a president doesn't have the authority to impose them. But the money had already been collected, the entries had already been filed, prices had already moved, and now the bureaucracy is caught in the aftermath. These are mutant tariffs not because the Supreme Court left them alive, or that Trump did, but because the country's machinery will.

When American bureaucracy works, it can move forward with imperial confidence. It doesn't work so well in reverse. On March 6, Customs and Border Protection told the Court of International Trade that unwinding the illegal tariffs would mean dealing with more than 53 million customs entries from over 330,000 importers and roughly $166 billion in collected duties. Something has to give.

And one thing that's giving way is yet more court time. Bloomberg Law reported a wave of consumer-driven litigation aimed at securing refunds from companies including FedEx, UPS and Costco. FedEx has said it would refund customers if it receives refunds from the government. Costco has said any recoveries would be returned through “lower prices and better values.”

The embarrassment, though, is not only Trump's. It is Congress's. The other key number in this fiasco is 150: the number of days Congress wrote into Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 for a temporary import tariff of up to 15 percent. In other words, there was already a lawful fast lane for short-term tariff action. Trump went the other way anyway. And after the Supreme Court struck that down, the White House pivoted to Section 122 for a new 10 percent temporary surcharge effective February 24. Congress doesn't even have the tools to tackle a president with Trump's willpower.

Common Knowledge

The right’s first instinct after the ruling was to treat it as another case of judges handcuffing a president who was trying to act decisively in the national interest. Trump called the decision “deeply disappointing” and said he was “absolutely ashamed” of the justices who sided against him. The original April 2, 2025, order itself framed the tariff program as a response to “large and persistent annual United States goods trade deficits.”

Some Republicans, including Representatives Don Bacon and Thomas Massie, praised the ruling as a defense of Congress’s authority, with Bacon saying that “the Constitution’s checks and balances still work.” Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch said major decisions about taxes and tariffs are routed through the legislative process “for a reason.”

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On the left, Senator Ed Markey and other Democrats have pushed legislation requiring tariff refunds with interest and said that the administration collected roughly $175 billion in illegal tariff revenue while raising prices on families and small businesses.

The right wanted a tariff strongman. The left focused on who had to pay. The real scandal is not simply that Trump grabbed power. It is that Congress had been loitering while that power drifted away, and now responsibility lies with the bureaucracy.

Uncommon Knowledge

Fifty-three million entries is not just a big number, but a sign that unlawful presidential power has become industrialized. The tariffs were announced loudly and implemented quietly. Entry by entry, shipment by shipment, fee by fee. And because it became routine, reversing it via the bureaucracy now looks absurd. Under current processes, officials estimated the job would take more than 4.4 million staff-hours and would interfere with its "vital national security functions." Spread across a normal federal work year, that is about 2,115 full-time work-years. Spread across 53 million entries, it is only about five minutes per entry.

The scorekeepers differ at the margins, but their broad verdict is the same. Penn Wharton estimated that reversing the tariffs could generate up to $175 billion in refunds. Tax Foundation estimated that the invalidated tariffs had already raised more than $160 billion through February 20. The Budget Lab at Yale estimated that the 2025 tariffs had raised roughly $194.8 billion in inflation-adjusted customs revenue above the 2022–2024 average as of January 2026. One of the largest tax grabs in recent memory was assembled under a statute with no explicit tariff language, and once the Supreme Court killed that theory the administration simply reached for Section 122—the explicit statute it could have used, in limited form, all along.

The arithmetic gets stranger the longer you stare at it. Try another way: the unwind implies roughly $37,700 in tariff collections for every labor hour needed to reverse the system, and roughly $3,130 per customs entry. It shows the mismatch between Congress's modest statutory guardrail and the industrial-scale mess that followed.

By the April 2 anniversary of "Liberation Day," the best summary is not that Trump's tariffs were killed by the Supreme Court. As the country is left sorting through 53 million entries, consumer suits, replacement tariffs and millions of hours of administrative work, they are dead enough to embarrass everyone, but alive enough to keep biting.

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