A federal appeals court has put a key tariff refund hearing in doubt just days before it was set to begin Tuesday, blocking an order that would have required U.S. Customs and Border Protection chief Rodney Scott to appear in person at the Court of International Trade. As of Monday morning, it was still unclear whether the hearing would go forward or whether a lower-level official would be sent instead.
Judge Richard Eaton had ordered Scott to testify about the administration’s compliance with a refund order that could affect widespread tariff payments, and the government has already reported more than $20 billion ordered in refunds. Scott’s team objected to his being compelled to give live testimony, and the appeals court issued a brief order late last week stopping that specific appearance while the broader dispute continued.
The hearing matters because government tariff revenue for May and trade deficit figures for April are due this week, and those numbers should help show how much money has actually been paid back. They should also give importers a clearer read on how much inventory they are still pulling forward ahead of new tariffs later this summer.
That timing is landing alongside a fresh round of tariff planning from the Trump administration, which announced this past week that it intends to impose 10% to 12.5% tariffs on major trading partners over forced labor concerns. The new tariffs are still evolving, but Oxford Economics projected that the overall effective U.S. tariff rate will rise to 9.7% from 9.3% now, while Grace Zwemmer said a sizable number of exemptions means the increase will be modest in most cases.
The deeper fight is over whether the government has done enough to comply with Eaton’s refund order at all. The administration is expected to appeal the judge’s view that all importers of record are entitled to refunds, and that argument sits at the center of a relationship between the court and the government that has grown more strained as some tariffs have been struck down, others have been deemed illegal but still collected, and another wave is set to hit later this summer under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
For importers, the immediate question is less about the legal theory than the practical one: whether Tuesday’s hearing happens, and if it does, who speaks for the government in Scott’s place. The next concrete markers are this week’s tariff revenue and trade deficit releases, which should show whether the refund process is moving as ordered or whether the white house tariff repayment strategy is still stuck in court.
