Last week, the staff at Learning Resources, an educational-toy company in Illinois that sells letter blocks, mat games, and a coding robot named Botley, checked an online portal managed by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and saw that its account had received a payment. As the week went on, more money came in. By Friday, the firm, which imports most of its products from China, had received more than ten million dollars—virtually all the money it had requested as a refund for tariffs that it paid in the past year. “I feel great about it,” Rick Woldenberg, the businessman whose family owns Learning Resources, told me from his home in Highland Park, about twenty miles north of Chicago. In April of last year, shortly after Donald Trump announced sweeping import duties on goods from China and scores of other countries, Learning Resources was one of several businesses that sued the Administration, arguing that the tariffs were illegal. In a landmark ruling this February, the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs, striking down the blanket tariffs on the ground that the President had exceeded the powers granted to him under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977, and ordering the federal government to issue refunds.

“The case itself was really important from a rule-of-law perspective, and there was a lot at stake for our firm,” Woldenberg said. The company employs about five hundred people. Woldenberg, in response to the tariffs, had implemented a hiring freeze, put off plans to build a new warehouse, and raised the prices of his firm’s products. Even with these measures, the company still missed its budget and sales targets for 2025. The tariff refunds have boosted its finances and enabled it to pay down some of the line of credit that it operates on, Woldenberg said.

But the relief has only been partial. With the Supreme Court ruling came a dissenting opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote that there were plenty of other federal statutes that might justify the President in imposing “most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.” Citing one of these laws, the Administration promptly announced new global duties of ten per cent, and although it has recently suffered another legal setback—the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled against those tariffs—the tariff saga is far from over. In the coming months, Trump is widely expected to declare a whole new round of duties based on Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers Presidents to impose tariffs on countries that have been shown to employ “unfair” trading practices. To meet this requirement, in form if not in substance, the Administration has been carrying out a fresh set of investigations into China and many other countries.

To sum up, and notwithstanding his friendly summit with Xi Jinping last week, Trump seems thoroughly determined to preserve his tariffs, in some form, and make them permanent. “How long can you stay in crisis mode?” Woldenberg said. “We are trying to make business decisions on a long-run basis. It’s exhausting being subject to the daily news cycle.”

Living with Trump isn’t just tiring; it’s costly—for consumers as well as businesses. Last year, he said that Americans would receive a tariff “dividend” of two thousand dollars each, but this turned out to be an empty pledge. According to Yale’s Budget Lab, his tariffs raised the over-all cost of imported goods by about 1.5 per cent last year, with much bigger impacts on certain items, such as clothes and leather goods. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the average cost to U.S. households was about a thousand dollars. Since some of these tariffs have been ruled illegal, it seems only right that consumers should get refunds, too. So far, however, Costco and FedEx are among the few big firms that have pledged to pass the government payments on to customers in the form of lower prices or refunds. The rest seem intent on using the cash to rebuild their profit margins, which, in some cases, were crimped when they absorbed some of the tariffs.

A number of class-action lawsuits have been filed against Amazon and other large companies on behalf of their customers. Woldenberg said that any businesses that import items and pay Trump’s tariffs will have to deal with the refund issue. He added that Learning Resources planned to keep its prices stable this year and the next, absorbing the higher costs of energy and other things. “We figure that is the best way to get back to where we were in a year or two,” he said. “I think this is a good-faith effort on our part.”

Woldenberg’s experience taking a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court is an exceptional one. But the time, energy, and resources that he and his colleagues at Learning Resources have devoted to dealing with Trump’s tariffs in their day-to-day business are typical of many companies, large and small. Obviously, some U.S. firms, such as steel companies, have benefitted from specific levies that were introduced explicitly to protect them from foreign competition. But, for most of the businesses affected by the blanket tariffs, it’s all shaping up to be a colossal waste of time and effort. And the policy hasn’t even worked on its own terms.

In recent years, even some advocates of free trade have come around to the idea that certain tariffs can be justified on strategic and national-security grounds, especially when working with an avowedly mercantilist country like China. The Biden Administration retained most of the Section 232 tariffs on Chinese goods that Trump introduced in his first term: it even expanded them. But the blanket tariffs that Trump brought in last year were different: they targeted any country that runs a trade surplus with the United States, even ones that are too poor to import much from the U.S. The economic concepts of comparative advantage and gains from trade are lost on Trump, who views any bilateral trade deficit as evidence of the U.S. being “ripped off.” The argument for his blanket tariffs was that reducing the over-all trade deficit would be a good thing in itself, and it would also revive manufacturing employment and transform the government’s finances.

So what is the record? Yale’s Budget Lab reports that the tariffs have raised about two hundred and fifteen billion dollars in revenues. But after the Supreme Court ruling roughly two-thirds of this will have to be repaid, so the general effect on the federal finances will be relatively minor. The trade deficit? Between March and October of last year, it fell sharply, but this was largely a product of international gold shipments and companies racing to beat Trump’s tariffs by placing their import orders before they took effect. For the whole of 2025, the trade deficit in goods hit a record level, and, so far this year, it has remained high. Rather than reducing the total number of imports, the Trump tariffs seem primarily to have diverted the source of them from China to other countries, particularly Vietnam and Mexico—a point that White House economists acknowledged last month in the 2026 Economic Report of the President, which noted a shift toward “more diversified global supply chains.”

Insofar as it goes, that’s a welcome development. However, it doesn’t lessen U.S. dependence on foreign money—trade deficits have to be financed by attracting foreign investment or lending—or create new factory jobs in Michigan and Ohio. When Trump was inaugurated for a second time, there were 12.7 million manufacturing jobs nationwide. Last month, there were 12.6 million. As the Biden Administration introduced generous subsidies for investing in certain technologies, such as semiconductors and electric vehicles, construction spending in manufacturing more than tripled. Since the November, 2024, election, it has fallen by about a fifth. Citing announcements from Apple, Nvidia, and other companies that they intend to build new plants in the U.S., the White House still claims that manufacturing is “roaring back.” So far, at least, there is little sign of this surge in aggregate statistics.

At the ground level, businesses are trying to make the best of a still highly uncertain situation. Woldenberg told me that the prospect of yet another round of tariffs does concern him, but he is hopeful that they, too, will get struck down by the courts. Late last year, he decided to go ahead with the new warehouse that he had been considering, which will be built at Learning Resources’ headquarters, in Vernon Hills. “Our business has roots back to 1916, and we are looking to the second century,” he said. “We are not put off by what happened last year. I don’t want to minimize it—it was very costly and traumatic. But we are forging on.” The tariff refunds will help businesses get back to some semblance of normality. Consumers are still waiting for their recompense.♦