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The Justice Department filed late on February 28 to delay tariff refund proceedings by four months. More than 2,000 lawsuits are now pending. The EU reconvenes on March 4 to decide whether the Turnberry trade deal is still worth ratifying. Nine days after the ruling, the chaos is deepening, not resolving.
When the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs on February 20, the expectation was that legal clarity would follow. It has not. The administration’s response has been to replace the invalidated regime as fast as possible while dragging out any mechanism that would return the money already collected. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the refund exposure at between $175 billion and $179 billion, a figure that exceeds the combined fiscal 2025 budgets of the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice, as the Ropes and Gray analysis noted. According to RSM’s February 26 assessment, the Treasury collected $269.1 billion in tariff revenue through January 2026, with the bulk accrued after Liberation Day last April. The Justice Department’s Friday filing at the Court of International Trade argued that the refund process demands careful deliberation, not speed, and requested a four-month pause before the court revives the question — Bloomberg reported the filing late on February 28.
That filing is revealing. The DOJ appeared to acknowledge for the first time that some form of refund process will occur, warning in its motion that the coming process will take time and citing a prior mass-refund situation that stretched over years. At a White House press conference on February 20, Trump initially told reporters refunds would have to be litigated for two years; when pressed further, he revised upward. As NBC News recorded the exchange, he added that the administration would end up in court for five years. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his dissent, wrote that the court’s majority said nothing about how to return the billions collected — and that the process was likely to be a mess, as had been acknowledged during oral arguments in November. Senate Democrats, led by Ron Wyden of Oregon, have introduced the Tariff Refund Act of 2026, requiring full reimbursement with interest within 180 days and prioritising small businesses. Representatives Steven Horsford and Janelle Bynum introduced a companion bill, the RELIEF Act, in the House. Neither is expected to pass without Republican support.
The Litigation Wave Grows
The number of lawsuits at the Court of International Trade has surpassed 2,000, according to the South China Morning Post’s February 28 tally, up from the roughly 1,800 that Reuters counted on the day of the ruling. FedEx was the first major corporation to file after the decision, lodging its complaint on February 23 in New York and demanding a full refund, per Kiplinger. Costco, Revlon and Bumble Bee Foods had filed pre-emptively before the ruling came down, seeking to secure their place in the queue, as NPR reported. Washington law firm Crowell and Moring alone has more than 150 cases pending at the trade court. The central unresolved question, as Julian Beach of Pillsbury told Reuters, is whether the Court of International Trade can issue nationwide relief or whether each importer will need to litigate individually. If the latter, the administrative burden on US Customs and Border Protection will be staggering.
Consumers, meanwhile, should expect nothing. Research published by the Harvard Business School’s Pricing Lab found that American households absorbed roughly a quarter of tariff costs through higher retail prices. CNN reported that figure on February 24 alongside the Tax Foundation’s estimate that tariffs added $1,000 in tax expenses per household in 2025. The Yale Budget Lab put the average family loss at $1,751 last year — a figure that Governor Gavin Newsom cited in California’s refund demand. But the refund mechanism applies only to importers of record who paid duties directly to CBP. Any downstream recovery would require separate litigation — and as Michael Ettlinger of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy told NPR on February 26, tracing tariff costs through a multi-layered supply chain may be literally impossible.
Europe’s March 4 Decision
The European Parliament has postponed ratification of the Turnberry trade deal twice — first in January over Trump’s Greenland threats, and again on February 24 after the Supreme Court ruling upended the agreement’s legal basis. Bernd Lange, chair of the Parliament’s International Trade Committee, laid out the arithmetic for colleagues at an emergency session that day: the Section 122 surcharge is not a baseline tariff but stacks on top of existing most-favoured-nation duties, pushing 7 to 8 percent of EU exports above the 15 percent ceiling that Turnberry had locked in, as Courthouse News Service reported from the session. That, Lange told reporters, constitutes a clear departure from the deal’s terms.
EU lawmakers reconvene on March 4 to assess whether Washington has offered sufficient clarity, according to the Globe and Mail. A plenary vote is tentatively scheduled for March 11. The signals so far are not encouraging. USTR Jamieson Greer told CBS’s Face the Nation on February 23 that the administration expects partners to stand by their deals, but has not explained how the Section 122 stacking interacts with Turnberry’s cap. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot questioned publicly whether the deal remains legally valid, telling French radio that one may be permitted to doubt it, as Courthouse News reported. Paris has floated activating the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument — a retaliatory mechanism that would allow the bloc to impose surcharges, exclude US firms from public procurement and restrict American investment in Europe — though Berlin and the European Commission have resisted. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, due in Washington in early March, told ARD that tariffs primarily harm the country that levies them. For European exporters already navigating the shifting costs of transatlantic trade arrangements, the March 4 session is the next inflection point.
Section 122: A Bridge to Where?
The replacement tariff regime — 10 percent under Section 122, announced within hours of the ruling and raised to 15 percent the following day — took effect on February 24. No president has previously invoked the statute. Its legal foundation is fragile: Section 122 requires a finding of fundamental international payments problems, a concept the administration’s own lawyers argued during the IEEPA case is conceptually distinct from the trade deficits Trump has cited as an emergency. The Peterson Institute for International Economics noted in its February 25 analysis that the US does not, in fact, have a balance-of-payments deficit in the traditional sense — foreign capital inflows more than cover the current account gap.
The 150-day clock expires on July 24. Extension requires a congressional vote that Senate Democrats have already pledged to block. A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published this week found that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs, against 34 percent who approve. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has stated publicly, as Ropes and Gray documented in their post-ruling analysis, that combining Section 122, Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs will produce virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026 — an admission that the administration’s goal is not compliance with the court’s spirit but revenue preservation. The 150-day window is being used to launch Section 301 investigations that could provide longer-term statutory cover. Trump heads to Beijing at the end of March to meet Xi Jinping, with USTR Greer telling Fox Business on February 26 that the administration aims to maintain China tariffs at 35 to 50 percent using alternative authorities.
Nine days in, the picture is this: the constitutional principle has been restored, the money has not been returned, and the tariff burden on American businesses and their trading partners has barely changed. The Supreme Court gave Congress back its taxing power. What Congress does with it — and whether the administration honours the ruling’s spirit or just its letter — will define the next 141 days.
