With Donald Trump’s tariffs being ruled illegal, the government may be on the hook for up to $170 billion in refunds. Because Amazon helped conceal how much tariffs raised consumer prices, it will be easier for companies to hoard refunds for themselves.
Now that Donald Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal, the government may be on the hook for up to $170 billion of refunds of levies that were unduly collected. Consumers might have been in a position to have some sense of how much of those refunds they are personally owed. But President Donald Trump and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos decided to keep that information concealed, which now makes it easier for any tariff refunds to be kept out of your hands and instead turned into a corporate bailout.
Recall that in late April 2025, Punchbowl reported that Amazon “will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product, according to a person familiar with the plan. The shopping site will display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs — right next to the product’s total listed price.”
One revelation from the story was that tariff transparency was entirely possible — it wouldn’t require some magical rocket science to simply let people know how much of the levies were being baked into prices. And because Amazon is the world’s largest retailer, its transparency initiative would have given individual consumers granular data about how much in tariffs they were paying when purchasing items on Amazon.
What’s more, because Amazon is so big, any tariff transparency initiative the company implemented might have set an economy-wide standard, effectively forcing every other large business to similarly itemize tariff costs being charged to you.
But that’s when the Trump administration intervened.
Within hours, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared that any such tariff transparency would be construed by the administration as “a hostile and political act by Amazon.”
Trump reportedly telephoned Bezos, and soon after Amazon’s corporate spokesman declared that “this was never approved and is not going to happen.”
Trump then told reporters, “Jeff Bezos is very nice. Terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. Good guy.”
In an alternate universe where Amazon’s transparency initiative was implemented, the retailer’s customers would have precise data about how much in tariffs they paid, which could galvanize public pressure for Amazon to pass any refunds it receives back to customers in those precise amounts.
But we don’t live in that alternative universe.
In solving the “problem” of letting Americans know exactly how much they paid in tariffs, Trump has helped make sure that any tariff refunds issued to Amazon can be more easily just pocketed by the company, turning those prospective refunds into a massive upward transfer of wealth from paying customers to a company founded by the world’s richest man.
This, of course, is likely to happen not just at Amazon but across the economy. Because Amazon and other large companies didn’t provide that economy-wide tariff transparency in their pricing, Americans had little visibility into exactly how much price increases were directly related to tariffs. And so most refunds are likely to just be pocketed by companies that used the tariff rationale to extract more cash from their customers.
In other words, unless there’s now legislation mandating an equitable distribution of refunds back to those who paid the levies, any refunds are likely to mostly pad corporations’ bottom line rather than alleviating America’s affordability crisis.
This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.