Will Small Businesses Get Their Money Back?

Last month, Jonathan Silva, the chief executive officer of WS Game Company, paused a meeting to try to make sense of a Supreme Court decision the moment it was handed down. “I have no law experience whatsoever,” he told me. But “I know that at 10 a.m., you go to the Supreme Court’s website, and I know what link to go to, and I know when to refresh it, and I got this 144-page—I forget the exact term of what it is. I’m not a lawyer.” The dense, allusive text foretold the future of his small business and tens of thousands like it. A year ago, Donald Trump unilaterally kicked off a global trade war, putting tariffs on imports from scores of countries and shifting the levies up and down repeatedly. The tariffs cost each American household $1,800 in 2025, slowing GDP growth by 0.5 percentage points and raising the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points. Companies had to scramble, reroute, and rejigger—in particular, small firms, which have less negotiating power and access to capital than their larger competitors, and often operate on thinner margins. Many firms faltered. A few failed. Yet trade-law experts argued that Trump never had the authority to impose the tariffs in the first place. And as Silva found out that morning, the Supreme Court agreed. “The Framers gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Chief Justice John Roberts argued. “Accordingly, the President must ‘point to clear congressional authorization’ to justify his extraordinary assertion of that power.” And “he cannot.” Silva sat there for a second after he read the decision, he told me, likening the feeling to the moment at the end of a roller coaster when the track straightens out and the cars slow down and the passengers glide back to the platform. “I exhaled for the first time in 11 months,” he said. “I got emotional.” Yet it’s not clear that he can get off the ride just yet, or that any of us are getting out of this amusement park anytime soon. The White House has turned around and announced new 15 percent charges on imported goods, with a different legal justification—Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. And Trump has promised to keep the trade war going as long as he is in power. Trump’s earlier tariffs put WS Game, a family-owned firm that produces premium board games, including collectible editions of Clue, Monopoly, and Scrabble, into “flat-out survival mode,” Silva told me. We first spoke shortly after Trump had placed a 145 percent import tax on the company’s products, which were manufactured in China. That spurred some of its brick-and-mortar retailers to renege on their purchase commitments. The tariff rate dropped to 30 percent, then Trump paused the levies. WS Game boosted production and imported extra containers of goods. “I over-ordered,” Silva said. “Now I’m holding inventory.” He added: “I don’t even know what I paid for some of the products, to be honest.” The company faced a slowdown in sales and an increase in costs, paying $1.6 million in direct import charges. It had to cut its owners’ compensation and stop matching its employees’ retirement contributions. It reduced spending on marketing and human resources. It took out a line of credit, helping it to cover a retainer for legal representation and $250,000 for research into shifting its manufacturing to Vietnam, Mexico, Canada, Thailand, or another country. Over the summer, Silva arranged to meet with a Brazilian manufacturer at a convention in Indianapolis. Two weeks before the meeting, Trump hiked tariffs on Brazilian imports in protest of the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro. “It was pretty darn close to impossible to find any of that expertise and experience we have with our trusted partners in China,” Silva said. With no viable option but to keep the company’s manufacturing where it was, WS Game rearranged its business structure to shift the burden of the levies to its retailers. WS Game did try to re-shore its production, as Trump wanted companies to do. But “we’re at the high end of expectations and quality,” Silva told me. “We’re not making just a regular cardboard box.” Not many American businesses make cardboard boxes, or heirloom-quality board games, or millions of other consumer goods that Americans want and need. In the end, WS Game found one U.S. factory to produce one game, out of the 130 in its product line: a forthcoming Monopoly set celebrating the United States’ 250th birthday. Still, it could not find an American woodworker to make the tiny houses and hotels, so it settled for plastic. And it couldn’t find a single domestic dice maker, so it imported them and included a disclaimer. With tariff rates holding at a more reasonable level, at least for now, WS Game has cut retail prices, posted new job listings, and paid out those retirement-matching funds. Things are looking up, Silva told me, particularly given that a court has ordered the Trump administration to refund companies affected by the illegal trade policy. Customs and Border Protection reverts payments “every day,” Richard Eaton, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade, argued. “They liquidate entries and make refunds.” Although not at this scale: The government has collected more than $130 billion in illicit tariffs over the past year. And not with this resistance: The Trump administration is seeking to delay the refund process, noting that CBP will have to go through millions of import records by hand. The president, for his part, is calling the Supreme Court “completely inept and embarrassing” and arguing that he does have the “absolute right” to impose trade levies. He’s looking into other legal vehicles for new charges, in addition to the 15 percent tariffs. Knowing he might face more trade chaos ahead, Silva is planning on filing for a refund, and has rejected hedge funds’ offers to buy his claim for nickels or dimes on the dollar. (Financiers are betting that the Trump administration will eventually pay out, but that many small importers can’t afford to wait.) But the company will never get back the time and energy that it wasted. “There was too much time spent focused on this and not on doing what we do best, and that’s bringing family fun back to a Friday night,” he told me. Even after the Supreme Court ruling, the country’s effective tariff rate remains high—essentially acting as a $600 annual tax increase on each household and cutting GDP growth by 0.2 percentage points. Small importers might eventually get a flush of funds, but American consumers won’t be so fortunate. Nobody expects them to get their money back.