The United States has paid back $118.9bn in the first ten months of this fiscal year through the account it uses to disburse money at Customs and Border Protection, according to the Treasury’s own daily cash ledger. In the whole of the previous fiscal year the same account paid out $10.8bn. The figures are published every business day in the Daily Treasury Statement, they are not seasonally adjusted or estimated, and they run through 29 July.
The shape matters more than the total. From October 2023 through April 2026 — thirty consecutive months — withdrawals through the CBP account never once exceeded $3.05bn, and averaged $1.15bn. Then in May 2026 the account paid out $23.3bn. In June it paid out $51.0bn, the largest month in the series by a factor of sixteen against anything before it. The first 29 days of July added another $30.3bn. Those three months alone come to $104.7bn, nearly ten times the entire preceding fiscal year.
One caveat belongs here rather than at the end. The Treasury labels this line “DHS – Customs & Border Protection (CBP)” and does not describe it as refunds; it is the account through which CBP’s outgoing payments flow, and it carries ordinary operating disbursements too. But those ran under $1.2bn a month for years, and no change in the agency’s running costs explains a $51bn month. What changed was not CBP’s spending. It was what CBP had been ordered to give back.
The reason is a judgment handed down five months ago. On 20 February the Supreme Court held, 6-3, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the President to impose tariffs — Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, reported at 607 U.S. 229, decided together with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections. The duties at issue had been imposed in April 2025 by executive order, at a minimum of 10% on imports from every trading partner and higher rates on dozens of countries. The same day as the ruling, a further executive order ended their collection and a proclamation replaced them with a 10% temporary import surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
What the ruling did not do was order anybody to hand the money back. The only discussion of refunds in the decision is in Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent, which predicted the United States might have to return billions to importers and that the process would be a mess. The mechanism arrived separately and quietly: on 20 April, Customs and Border Protection deployed a new system inside its trade platform — Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, or CAPE — to pay IEEPA refunds in bulk, with interest, rather than entry by entry. A second phase followed on 29 June. The agency describes itself as paying these refunds “as authorized by court order or applicable law”, and the Court of International Trade has been monitoring the rollout through orders in individual importers’ cases rather than by a single global instruction.
The dates line up. CBP’s refund machinery went live on 20 April; the Treasury account started paying out at scale the following month.
The US Court of International Trade had docketed 3,447 cases between 1 January and Friday afternoon, two more than when this piece was begun that morning. For comparison, it took 267 cases in the whole of 2024 and 275 in 2023, and its yearly totals since 2013 otherwise sit between 220 and 1,072. The court’s own numbering confirms the count independently of any database: cases are numbered sequentially within a calendar year, so the sequence number of the newest case is the year’s running total, and Friday afternoon’s was 1:26-cv-03447. The last case of 2025 was 1:25-cv-01072; the last of 2024 was 1:24-cv-00268.
There is one precedent, and it is instructive precisely because it does not match. The court took 3,949 cases in 2020, more than it has taken so far this year. But 3,539 of them arrived in September alone, and 3,102 in five days — 220 on the 17th, 1,281 on the 18th, 665 on the 19th, 434 on the 20th and 722 on the 21st. That was a filing deadline, not a caseload. By October the court was back to 116 cases a month, and by 2022 to 356 for the year.
This year has no such spike and no such recovery. Filings have exceeded 114 a month every month since December 2025 — eight consecutive months, against a 2024 monthly median of 22 — with the peak in March, at 1,277. The two lightest months of the run, May and June, were still around five times any ordinary month. At the pace set so far, roughly 16 cases every day of the year, 2026 would finish near 5,900.
What the docket data does not supply is why any individual case was brought. The court’s entries in the federal records system carry no cause of action and no nature-of-suit code, so the reason a given company sued has to be read from its complaint rather than counted. What the case names do show is the type of party: US Hose Corporation, Elo Touch Solutions, Macco Organiques, American Woodmark, Federal Signal, Loveday Lumber. They are manufacturers, distributors and food companies, filing individually against the United States and CBP, and the same was true of the 2020 wave.
Corporate filings fill in some of what the dockets leave out. First Solar told the Securities and Exchange Commission this week that it had submitted refund claims during the quarter and “began receiving payment for certain claims”, and that its expected refunds may be partly owed onward to its own customers — a reminder that the importer who gets the money back is often not the party that ultimately bore the cost.
The unwinding is not the end of the story so much as a change of instrument. Section 122 allows a temporary surcharge to run for 150 days, and the 10% replacement duty duly lapsed on 24 July. The same day, the US Trade Representative brought in tariffs across 60 economies under Section 301, on the grounds that they fail to prohibit imports of goods made with forced labour: 10% for those with such a prohibition or a commitment to one, including India, Malaysia and the European Union, and 12.5% for the rest, including China and Vietnam. Separately, the three Section 338 proclamations against Canada that The Fold reported on 22 July are due to take effect around 19 August, under a statute last used in the 1940s. The refunds now being paid cover duties that have already been collected and struck down; they say nothing about the ones replacing them.