A group of Senate Democrats, joined by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), are pressing U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer over tariffs refunds following a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that ruled certain Trump administration tariffs were illegal.
Page F2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 27 September 2026
Costco passes members most of the $184 million refunded after tariffs were ruled illegal; the rest goes unmentioned
As it ran on the front
A refund travels back to whoever paid it at the border, and at the border the payer was not you. You paid at the till. The duty was entered in a company's name, and the customs code returns duty to the name on the entry — that is what a drawback is, an instrument for sending money back up the channel it came down, to the party of record. One hundred and eighty-four million dollars, returned to Costco. Most of it, the company says, will go toward lower costs for members. Most. Turn that over — most, not all, and no figure is attached to the part that does not.
Someone will say the Court fixed this. Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled certain of the tariffs illegal, and the illegality changed nothing whatever about the direction of travel. On the 22nd of September, Warren, Heinrich, Whitehouse, Blumenthal and Sanders wrote to Jamieson Greer to ask after consumer refunds. A letter ... and the refund has a name on it.…
…(cont) Slok estimated the refunds at 0.2 percentage points of growth, roughly 4.7 percent of the projected increase. Zero point two. Your share arrives as a range of everyday items, including food and beverages. The amount is not stated.
What the sieve holds, the man keeps. The hens take what falls.
“A hundred and eighty-four million comes back, and the company gets to decide how much of it shows up on your food and beverages — "most," they said, and most is a word with a hole in it. Senators spent the 22nd writing a letter asking where the consumer refunds went; four days later we found out where one of them went. Nobody's mailing you a statement for the part that stayed put.”
“It's a refund — a refund, the money goes back to whoever paid it at the border, that's the statute working, that is not a scandal. And Costco is passing it along voluntarily, which is more than Senator Warren's letter ever did for anybody's grocery bill. Did I say voluntarily? That doesn't sound like me. As a matter of course, is what I said, they're a membership company, members come first, they always have.”
The receipts
The big box retailer said the lower pricing from tariff refunds was applied to a range of everyday items, including food and beverages, as well as other product categories.
· Tariff Refunds Giving Temporary Jolt To Economic Growth After SCOTUS Handed Trump Defeat from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.