WARREN, Ohio – For Sam Miller, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in February to scuttle President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs proved a welcome step.
Now, he and thousands of business owners like him across the country are waiting on whether they’ll recoup billions of dollars in tariff payments the federal government said it would refund.
Miller, the president of Trumbull Industries Inc. in Warren, said the nature of his business places the company directly in the crosshairs of those tariffs, since the vast majority of the manufactured products it sells are imported. As a result, the tariff bill for the company over the past year has been steep.
“All I want to say is that it’s multimillions of dollars. So it’s significant,” Miller said.
Indeed, there are likely many firms in the Mahoning Valley that do business internationally that could qualify for some type of tariff refund, specialists say. “Any company in the region that has imported from China, for example, there could be tens of thousands of dollars,” in refunds, said Mousa Kassis, director of the Export Assistance Network at the Ohio Small Business Development Center at Youngstown State University.
In February, the Supreme Court ruled that tariffs imposed in 2025 by Trump through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional. The decision triggered a scramble on developing a process to refund money to those importers that had paid the additional levies.
Kassis said the federal government is on the hook to repay approximately $166 billion to firms across the country that imported goods that qualify under the ruling.
Among those expecting large refunds are automakers. Ford Motor Co. said last week that it estimates tariff refunds of $1.3 billion, while in its latest earnings report for the first quarter, General Motors Co. reported it anticipated tariff refunds totaling approximately $500 million. The prospective refund boosted the automaker’s revenue guidance by $500 million for 2026.
Check Is in the Mail
On April 20, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol launched a new web portal that allows those seeking refunds to apply online.
So far, the process appears to be running smoothly.
“All of our paperwork is done, and we’re waiting on next steps,” Trumbull Industries’ Miller said.
The process to file for a refund was time consuming but not difficult, he added. All of the information is already in the hands of the federal government, so any overseas shipment or purchase or tariff payment is easy to justify and well-documented.
“Every single container is recorded, the items on it, the price paid,” Miller said. “The government has very detailed records of everything that is imported to the United States.”
Trumbull Industries is a local distributor of bathroom and kitchen products, as well as pipes, valves, cabinets, appliances, countertops and industrial supplies. It serves mechanical contractors, home builders and remodelers, industrial and commercial accounts, retailers, and e-commerce customers.
Approximately 60% of the business is distribution, while another 40% is through the sale of manufactured products that the company mostly sources from overseas, Miller said. Of that segment, between 80% and 85% of those goods are produced in China, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Spain and Italy, and then shipped to the U.S.
Miller said the company engages the services of a freight-forwarding company that manages the complex logistics of moving the product from the factory to an ocean-going vessel bound usually for the West Coast, then offloading the cargo there, and then transporting the goods to Trumbull Industries.
Adjusting to the tariffs was not easy, Miller noted, and forced the company to raise its prices to help offset the higher tax. “At the same time, we pushed back to some of the plants and asked them to share,” he said. “We took the lion’s share of it, and our customer was paying some.”
Miller added he’s optimistic that the government will make good on its promise to refund these tariffs. “I think there’s a reasonable chance that it will occur,” he said. “But there is some reasonable doubt in the business community as to whether it will be paid.”
Specialty Purchases
Mark Lamoncha, CEO of Humtown Additive in Boardman, said he was expecting to pay the nominal 10% tariff on a major piece of equipment the company purchased last year from a manufacturer in China. However, the additional tariffs raised that levy to approximately 50%, which caused Humtown to pay $154,000 in tariffs on the machine.
“It was considerable,” LaMoncha said. “We were just caught in a spot when he just started to raise the tariffs.”
The company has applied for a $154,000 refund through the portal from its import broker, who would then pass the funds on to Humtown, Lamoncha said. He said it’s likely that he would still pay the nominal tariff on the equipment.
“Probably what they’ll do is hold back the original tariff and refund the rest,” he said. “So there could be some uncertainty.”
Humtown manufactures sand core molds through the 3D printing process and secured the purchase of a sophisticated new piece of equipment last year manufactured by the Chinese company Amsky. The printer is able to produce sand molds at more than twice the rate as Humtown’s current 3D printers. The company plans to add another Amsky printer to its operations in Boardman.
“We have 14 machines now, and these two will make 16,” Lamoncha said. “Eight of these would replace 22 of the older-style machines that we’ve been using for 10 years.”
Lamoncha said he expects some hiccups, since the refund process was put into place fairly quickly after the Supreme Court ruling, but expressed confidence that he’ll see his refund within the anticipated 90-day window.
“Every broker is going to have a different speed in refunding your money, since in all fairness, they’ve never done this before,” he said.
Nevertheless, Lamoncha thought the Trump tariffs were a necessary measure to bring parity to past trade imbalances with those countries that imposed stiff barriers on U.S. products, while the United States allowed imports at rates as low as 2%.
“There was a huge disparity of what was being paid to the U.S. versus what we were having to pay,” he said. “If there were 10% around the world, then it would be a very level playing field. We would like to sell some of our cores to countries that don’t have these printers.”
In some cases, refunds could find their way back into consumers’ wallets as larger freight companies such as UPS and FedEx have stated they plan to refund those customers who paid higher costs on international shipments because of tariffs.
Average consumers, however, who at some point shelled out more money for retail goods whose tariff costs were already baked into higher prices, aren’t likely to see much of any refund, added the Export Assistance Network’s Kassis.
“I don’t think we’re gonna see a dime,” he said of consumers.