One year of federal tariffs pulled more money out of Connecticut than the Lamont administration’s 2023 tax cuts put back in.
As of April 20, importers can now apply to recover a portion of what they paid in tariffs levied through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in February.
The tariffs at issue represent one slice of a broader tariff regime.
U.S. law provides several different statutory paths for imposing duties, and IEEPA is one of them.
It served as the basis for nearly two-thirds of the tariffs the Trump administration enacted during its first year, beginning in April 2025.
How We Got Here
The Supreme Court ruled, on a 6–3 vote Feb. 20 that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.
The majority held that IEEPA’s grant of authority to regulate imports during a national emergency does not extend to taxation, which the U.S. Constitution assigns to Congress.
The decision invalidated every IEEPA tariff imposed since April 2025, including the 10% reciprocal duty on most trading partners, the fentanyl-linked duties on Canada, Mexico, and China, and the China-specific rates that reached as high as 145%.
Refund guidance is now in place, though it took two months to get there.
The Supreme Court did not address refunds, so the Court of International Trade ordered Customs and Border Protection in March to refund IEEPA duties collected from all importers of record, not only named plaintiffs.
CBP opened its portal this week, along with a step-by-step guide to navigating the refund process.
The agency estimates it owes roughly $166 billion across 330,000 importers on 53 million entries brought in between April 2025 and February 2026.
Connecticut dodged the worst outcomes
States were impacted differently across the country.
- South Carolina importers paid the most in IEEPA duties relative to the size of their state economy, at 0.93% of GDP.
- Kentucky and Georgia followed at 0.85% and 0.77%. New Jersey, the hardest-hit Northeast state, paid 0.7% of GDP.
- Connecticut fared better. Importers here paid roughly $692 million in IEEPA duties between February and December 2025, equal to 0.18% of state GDP and placing the state in the bottom third nationally.
Within the Northeast, Connecticut’s burden came in below Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The dollar figure is still substantial in state fiscal terms.
To put into perspective, the $692 million Connecticut importers paid over 11 months exceeds the full annual value of the 2023 Lamont tax relief package, which the administration estimated at $460 million a year across the income tax cut, the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the senior pension exemption.
It also likely exceeds nearly a decade of revenue from the state’s so-called “temporary” 10% corporate tax surcharge.
Drag on the business environment
Tariffs weighed on a Connecticut manufacturing sector that was already under strain.
The sector shed 2,600 jobs in 2025, a 1.7% decline that pushed employment to its lowest level since 2021 and marked the steepest single-year loss outside of the pandemic in over a decade.
Nationally, manufacturing contracted for nine consecutive months through November.
Respondents to the ISM’s nationwide October Manufacturing PMI survey filed more than six negative comments about tariffs for every positive comment of any kind.
Connecticut manufacturers voiced the same frustration.
CBIA’s 2025 Manufacturing Report shows 66% of manufacturers believed tariffs negatively impacted their business, with 3% saying the levies were positive.
Ninety-five percent said the cost of doing business was rising, with tariffs compounding pressure from labor, healthcare, and energy costs.
Refunds do not reverse the supply chain and pricing decisions producers made over a year of IEEPA duties, but they return capital to a sector running on thin margins, and hopefully will help producers recover from a challenging 2025.
Dustin Nord is the director of the CBIA Foundation for Economic Growth & Opportunity.
