International companies are getting tariff refunds — with added, taxpayer-funded interest. People in America who have paid higher prices as a result of President Donald Trump’s relentless tariff maneuvering are stuck footing the bill.
That’s according to reports from Asian business trade publications, including Nikkei Asia, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which have detailed the ways publicly-listed Chinese companies have netted about $160 million since April, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Treasury Department started reissuing more than $166 billion in tariff refunds. Some of those refunds represent more than half of the companies’ net profits. In addition to refunding the tariffs importers actually paid, taxpayers are on the hook for growing interest payments to which importers, including qualified foreign businesses, are entitled.
“It’s like a triple whammy when you think about it for consumers,” Breyon Williams, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think-tank, told TPM, “because you have the tariffs that get passed on to them, they pay the higher price. They don’t get the refunds back as a result of that. The companies get the refunds back, and they usually use that to pad profits.”
Ahead of a consequential midterm election, several polls continue to find Trump and his economic policies underwater with voters.
Last Friday’s consumer price index report, coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and measuring price inflation, showed prices up 3.4% year over year in August. At the same time, real earnings dropped slightly, showing wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs.
An early September Quinnipiac poll found 65% of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy. 18% of Republicans disapproved of his performance, compared to 96% of Democrats and 75% of Independent voters.
The Supreme Court in February found that tariffs Trump levied under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act are a tax on the American people and that only Congress has taxation authority. Then, the Court of International Trade ordered the government to refund those tariffs to companies listed as the importer of record on customs declarations. Because companies are allowed to select from a list of possible importers of record, it’s plausible and permissible that some of those designees would be foreign-owned companies, Matthew Seligman, a constitutional law scholar who filed amicus briefs in the IEEPA case, told TPM. In the case of a tiny fraction of the $166 billion owed to around 330,000 importers, some of those designees are internationally-owned.
“The overwhelming majority, the vast, vast, vast majority of [importers of record] are American companies,” Seligman, who represents importers seeking IEEPA refunds, said.
“That said,” he continued, “it is both legally and practically possible for a foreign company to be listed as the [importer of record].”
That could happen a few different ways, said Seligman. A foreign company could operate in the U.S. and import goods to its foreign-owned entity. In the more common case that a foreign business has an American subsidiary, the foreign business could still legally be listed as the importer of record. Or, Seligman said, a foreign supplier could have agreed to pay Trump’s tariffs as part of a business deal with an American company.
According to Nikkei Asia, most of the Chinese refund recipients are in the tech sector. Seventeen publicly-traded companies have received refunds so far, even as eligible Chinese companies have shied away from recouping funds because of concerns about political and economic retaliation, the publication reported.
Shoppers and U.S.-based importers, not foreign exporters as Trump has claimed, paid nearly all — almost 90% — of Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
“One could argue that the U.S. government imposed tariffs that were borne on U.S. consumers, who paid those tariffs, and some of that money went to foreign companies,” Williams said.
At their 2025 rate, those tariffs cost families an average of more than $2,000 on an annualized basis, a Yale Budget Lab study found. And since Trump hasn’t stopped imposing tariffs under different, also novel, and potentially legally dubious frameworks, tariffs are costing the average household $1,100 more per year, according to the Yale Budget Lab’s most recent analysis.
The Libertarian Cato Institute calculated that $22 million in interest is accrued each day tariff refunds are not repaid to importers, costing taxpayers an estimated $700 million a month. The mechanism by which the government funds those interest payments is wonky, but is directly tied to issues driving U.S. treasury bond yields to record highs, putting the government on the hook for more expensive payouts, and driving up long-term borrowing costs, Williams said.
“That interest that the government now has to pay… that’s sending bad signals to investors who are now demanding more return in order to lend to the government,” William said. “What that does is drives up a lot of your long-term credit, your mortgage.”
In that way, Trump’s tariff regime is ironically working exactly against his implacable desire to coerce the U.S. central bank to cut interest rates. Ahead of the Federal Reserve’s Wednesday rate-setting meeting, bankers and analysts are expecting an interest rate hike, which would mark the first hike since 2023.
“It’s also pretty ironic,” said Williams, “because the Fed is responding to inflation that was self-inflicted.”
