NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben speaks to Wall Street Journal business reporter Theo Francis about refunds some businesses are getting on the billions of dollars they've paid on President Trump's tariffs.

Transcript

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, HOST:

American consumers and businesses have largely paid the price for President Trump's tariffs. Various studies have found that foreign exporters have shouldered between 4 and 10% of those tariffs. Now some American businesses are starting to get their money back. Big companies like FedEx, Amazon, Nike and Apple have reported large refund payments so far, ranging from $600 million to 2 billion dollars. This comes after the Supreme Court struck down a big part of the Trump administration's sweeping tariff regime earlier this year. Theo Francis covers business for The Wall Street Journal, and he joins me now. Good morning.

THEO FRANCIS: Good morning.

KURTZLEBEN: So let's start with the big picture here. U.S. companies paid around $160 billion for these unlawful tariffs. How much of this money will they get back?

FRANCIS: Some of the companies are reporting that they are getting back pretty much everything that they paid or everything that they requested as a refund. They should be getting all of it, but we don't know how much of it maybe would have gone to companies that are now bankrupt or out of business or that might not be claimed for one reason or another.

KURTZLEBEN: Right. Now, I mentioned a few big corporations earlier that are getting refunds. What about small businesses?

FRANCIS: So that's much harder to see. We get to see the big companies that report significant amounts of refunds. These are the companies that had significant tariff payments in the first place. And so, you know, it all comes down to materiality, right? What do companies have to disclose? Because it might be important for investors to know. That's what we get to see. We looked at the 500 biggest companies, so this is not necessarily a representative sample. They also have the staff to apply for these refunds right away. The Customs and Border Protection portal opened on April 20, and some of these companies said we applied on April 20.

KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.

FRANCIS: Not every company has that kind of wherewithal.

KURTZLEBEN: What does the administration's process look like for issuing these refunds?

FRANCIS: Well, from the outside, it looks pretty simple. The companies have pretty much said, we applied, we were approved and then either we expect to get the money or we've gotten the money. And that's really it. We don't see a lot of complication. Now, there may be applications that get kicked back for one reason or another. We've seen some court filings that suggest that's the case, but we don't know how big a proportion of the dollar amount that is.

KURTZLEBEN: Now, when the Supreme Court first overruled these tariffs, there were fears that the refund process would just be chaos. But you've reported that many companies got their money back pretty quickly, at least some of those big companies. Is it fair to say the refund process is working well?

FRANCIS: So far, it seems to be going smoothly for big companies and big importers. We haven't heard of a lot of hitches at that level. We'll have to see how it plays out over time.

KURTZLEBEN: Now, I imagine our listeners are wondering about how this plays out for them because according to the Yale University Budget Lab, the estimated household costs due to tariffs total about $1,100 annually under current law. So tariffs can cause a lot of individual financial pain. Have companies talked about at all sharing any of this refund money with their customers?

FRANCIS: Yes. So Amazon has said it sees a limited set of circumstances where it might be able to trace tariff costs that have passed along to customers to those customers, and some consumers have sued. So there are lawsuits against some retailers and consumer companies essentially saying, hey, we want a piece of those refunds.

KURTZLEBEN: Many companies pointed to the illegal tariffs as justification for raising the prices of all sorts of products like food and clothing. Now that the refund money is flowing, should we expect prices to go back down?

FRANCIS: There are so many parts to that question that it's actually very hard to predict. But what we do know is the tariffs aren't gone.

KURTZLEBEN: Right.

FRANCIS: These tariffs are gone, but there are a lot of other tariffs that remain in place or some new ones that have been put in place. And one of the things we saw in corporate disclosures is that many companies are saying, well, we're getting, you know, a few hundred million dollars back in refunds. We expect hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in tariff costs this year. So some of the companies have even said that the new tariffs seem to roughly replace the old ones. The other thing is that consumers didn't get a bill that said, here's your tariff bill.

KURTZLEBEN: Right.

FRANCIS: So it's really hard to pin down what any one of us paid because of the tariffs. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of prices went up. Some of that was clearly due to the tariffs. Some of it was blamed on the tariffs. How those change or whether companies work discounts into account for the refunds they get is much harder to predict. Businesses have a little bit clearer of a standpoint, right? They can go to their major suppliers and say, hey, we know you got big refunds on these tariffs. We want a piece of that. That's a much easier conversation than, you know, millions of individuals trying to go to a giant retailer.

KURTZLEBEN: It's Theo Francis, who reports for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you.

FRANCIS: Thank you.

Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.