A federal trade court has ordered Rodney S. Scott, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to appear at a hearing next month on the Trump administration’s handling of roughly $166 billion in tariff refunds.
The unexpected demand, issued on Wednesday, hinted at a judge’s ongoing concern that the government has not fully complied with a directive to return all of the money amassed under duties that were declared illegal by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
At the heart of the matter are the so-called reciprocal tariffs that President Trump previously applied to imports from around the world. In February, a majority of justices on the nation’s highest court struck down those tariffs, finding that Mr. Trump had exceeded his authority under law. That decision forced the government to repay the money, plus interest.
Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Court of International Trade took the first, formal steps to compel the administration to begin the refund process. While Mr. Trump publicly opposed returning the money, his administration still worked to set up a system to do so. It officially began accepting importers’ requests for repayment in late April.
But the refund system does not allow all importers to recover the taxes they paid from tariffs imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The government said in a court filing in April that it could process refunds for only about $127 billion out of the approximately $166 billion collected.
Otherwise, customs officials have said little publicly about how they might handle the remaining imports that were subject to IEEPA tariffs. The affected goods include those on which tariff payments were calculated and finalized earlier in Mr. Trump’s trade war, and others that are subject to more complicated import rules, the government has previously indicated.
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