Shaheen Calls for Automatic and Swift Tariff Tax Refunds, Real Relief for Small Businesses and Families
(Washington, DC) – U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a senior member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, led several Senate Democrats in calling on the Trump Administration to put in place an automatic, streamlined tariff refund process that provides real relief to small businesses and families in New Hampshire and nationwide.
In a letter to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney S. Scott, the lawmakers wrote that the Administration’s proposed refund process—the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system—places an unnecessary burden on small businesses and individual importers.
The Senators wrote, in part: “There is no principled reason for the Trump administration to conduct the refund process this way. CBP already has the payment records it needs to issue refunds. As of March 4, 2026, CBP reported that more than 330,000 importers had paid or deposited approximately $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs across more than 53 million entries.”
They continued: “If the government has records of every entry on which illegal tariffs were collected, it necessarily has records of every entry on which a refund is owed. Requiring businesses to file declarations to identify those entries is an unnecessary process that seems designed to discourage and reduce the number of refunds the government must ultimately pay.”
They concluded: “The CIT, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court have spoken. Every cent of illegal IEEPA tariffs must be returned. The only question is whether CBP will make that process as simple and equitable as possible, or whether it will implement a complicated and unfair system through which large corporations and Wall Street will benefit financially.”
The Senators requested answers to the following questions by April 10, 2026:
- How does CAPE comply with the CIT order that the government issue tariff refunds?
- How does CAPE comply with representations from Administration attorneys in court that it would promptly, and at no cost to businesses, issue refunds if the tariffs were struck down?
- Why did CBP develop CAPE rather than repurpose the existing ACE system to automatically issue refunds? Please provide any documents analyzing the shortcomings of repurposing the ACE system to automatically issue refunds.
- Why is CAPE “opt-in,” requiring affirmative action by tariff payers?
- Why does CAPE require importers to identify entry summaries when CBP already has that information?
- How will CBP ensure that each step of the refund process is transparent and accessible to small businesses?
- Will there be a formal appeal system for businesses that dispute the amount of the refund issued by CBP?
The full text of the letter can be found here.
Senator Shaheen has led efforts in Congress to mitigate the harmful impacts of President Trump's tariffs. Just last month, Shaheen led the introduction of the Tariff Refund Act, legislation that would require full refunds of President Trump’s illegal tariffs after they were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 6-3 vote. In January of last year, before President Trump took office, Shaheen introduced the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes on Imported Goods Act to shield American businesses and consumers from rising prices imposed by tariffs on imported goods into the United States by clarifying that the President does not have the authority to levy sweeping tariffs under IEEPA—while preserving IEEPA’s authority for sanctions and other tools. Shaheen then led more than 30 of her Senate colleagues and 171 House colleagues made in a bipartisan Amicus Brief she filed with the Supreme Court last year.
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