Billions are on the line. Who will get tariff refunds?

It’s been roughly 10 months since President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” global tariffs, which he imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. What followed were a series of shifting, country-by-country pronouncements about the specific rates, categories, and effective dates — as well as carveouts, reversals, reclassifications, additional guidelines, and all manner of other changes.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued implementation instructions as details changed, sometimes days or weeks following announcements. Importers, exporters, and trading partners scrambled to price goods, structure contracts, and speed up or delay shipments amid the constantly evolving rules. Investors repriced stocks to reflect new costs created by tariffs. Even as academics and lawyers debated the legal basis of the tariffs, individual companies struggled to mitigate tariff impacts and message those impacts to analysts and shareholders. The Federal Reserve, economists, and government researchers rushed to determine the precise inflationary effects.

Now comes the even messier part.

At least 1,800 companies have already filed lawsuits seeking refunds since the Supreme Court ruled many of the tariffs unlawful last week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Still, the legal path for companies is far from clear, even as cases pour into the Court of International Trade, a specialized federal court in New York, where corporate legal teams are pushing for prompt repayment with interest. Many smaller companies, unable to afford legal help to address their claims, are nevertheless hoping for refunds, too.

Trade law specialists are predicting a flood of additional filings, comparing the growing wave to decades of asbestos litigation, except compressed into a far shorter timeframe.

An additional complication: Tariff revenue went into the Treasury's general fund, not a separate account, meaning refund efforts will require coordination between courts, Customs, and the Treasury. Trump has suggested that litigation could drag on five years.

It does not appear likely that American consumers will receive refunds. That’s because the tariffs were paid directly by importers — manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and logistics companies — when the goods entered the U.S. Even as consumers bore much of the cost, there’s no clear legal mechanism by which they could receive funds.

In other words, though the tariffs raised costs across vast swaths of the economy, figuring out who will receives refunds may prove as chaotic as imposing them in the first place. At the same time, analysis from Goldman Sachs $GS suggests that inflation caused by tariffs is unlikely to abate, even as those ruled unlawful are rolled back, with higher prices here to stay.