The news on his phone left Richard Brown so stunned he stumbled past the exit of the bagel shop where he was grabbing breakfast. Then, he couldn't find his car in the parking lot.
On that February day, the Supreme Court had struck down most of President Trump's tariffs, which business owners like Brown had been paying for almost a year. The thoughts came to him in a jumble: How would U.S. Customs refund the duties it had illegally collected? When might Brown get his money back?
As he trudged toward the answers to those questions, Brown kept an audio diary that he shared with NPR. And his experience illustrates something that's raising alarm bells among trade experts: the prospect that thousands of U.S. businesses may never get back the billions of tariff dollars the U.S. government promised to refund.
Immediately after losing the court case, Trump and other U.S. officials began saying that refunds were so complex that they could take years. Companies like Costco and Revlon had pre-emptively filed lawsuits to stake their claims. Many business owners began talking to their lawyers and customs brokers for advice.
Brown doesn't have those people. His company, Proof Culture, is just him in Ohio and his friend Erron Combs in Virginia. Sometimes Brown's father helps out. They're sneakerheads selling to other sneakerheads.
"I don't want to be a customs broker when I grow up," Brown says, laughing.
Proof Culture started out making custom sneakers, then shifted to sales: laces, cedar shoe trees, storage boxes, crease protectors. They got into importing — first from China and now also Mexico — just three years ago in what Brown calls his "express master class of importing, tariff edition."
They estimate the government owes them up to $25,000 in tariff refunds. It's not life-changing money for the business, Brown says, but it's about 10% of Proof Culture's revenue last year — a sum that could buy a lot of shoelaces and advertising.
Like many small importers, they'd stitched together their supply chain: shipping by sea and by air, through FedEx and Amazon, relying on freight-forwarding companies through their Chinese suppliers. Proof Culture paid the bills, got the goods and focused on selling; they rarely handled customs forms. But to get a tariff refund, that had to change.
The Trump administration quickly began to roll out new tariffs to replace the court-rejected ones, using new legal justifications. Brown's new shipments arrived with ever-changing customs fees. He spent weeks digitizing stacks of old purchase orders and building an AI tool to help track his shipping invoices. He left futile voicemails with his Chinese freight-forwarders for missing paperwork.
In early March, U.S. Customs said it would build an online system for refund claims, no lawsuits necessary. This relieved Brown's worry about suing for refunds, but also meant he had to learn a customs portal he'd never used before.
Brown listened to trade groups' webinars and kept thinking just how easy it was to pay the tariffs, in the first place. And now, it was like filing taxes: The government had all his data, but it was his responsibility to do the math and show the proof.
Brown had plenty of other things to do: There was the actual tax season, family plans and emergencies, plus lots of shoe gear to sell to pay the bills.
About a week before the tariff-refund process launched, U.S. Customs gave a reassuring update in court: The agency's new portal for refund claims was nearly ready and set to process the vast majority of shipments for which refunds were due.
But this estimate hinged on the fact that all those shipments had been handled by a small group of prolific importers — companies that quickly got ready to file their claims. More than two-thirds of importers were not ready — many of them small importers like Brown. They told NPR about technical errors, struggling to even log into the portal or being stuck on hold for hours with U.S. Customs, getting no answer.
When the refund portal opened on April 20, businesses that applied did so in minutes. Brown was not among them. And he's still not ready.
The next day, trade experts at the libertarian Cato Institute wrote that the refund process, not being automated or instant, risked shortchanging thousands of American companies:
"Intentionally or not," their analysis said, "the federal government will likely keep tens of billions of dollars it should have returned to importers months ago — and that it promised US courts it would return if they invalidated the tariffs at issue."
In the latest court update, about a week into the refund process, U.S. Customs said it had rejected more than a third of filed claims for technical or data errors, though importers can refile. As of April 26, the agency said it had accepted claims covering about a fifth of the shipments for which it owes refunds.
"It's money, and every dime matters for a small business," Brown says about the refund. He and Combs are still plugging away, gearing up to file their claim, though Brown often wonders if the effort is worth it.
"I can't chase every fire," he says, "and right now, I feel like a firefighter."
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