Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he feels “confident” the Trump administration will win the fight to rescue President Trump’s tariffs in the Supreme Court after lower courts invalidated them.
During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Bessent was asked by host Kristen Welker whether the administration was prepared to offer rebates on the tariffs if the Supreme Court ruled against them.
“I am confident that we will win at the Supreme Court,” he said.
However, he argues that there are “numerous other avenues that we can take.”
When pushed as to whether the administration would “be prepared” to offer rebates, Bessent said the U.S. “would have to give a refund on about half the tariffs,” adding that it “would be terrible for the treasury.”
“There’s no ‘be prepared,'” he said. “If the court says it, we’d have to do it.”
Tariff rebates, introduced by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) in July, would provide $600 tariff rebates to almost all Americans and to their dependent children. It would be modeled on the direct payments Congress authorized in the 2020 CARES Act, which provided $1,200 direct payments to adults and $500 direct payments to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump is pushing for the Supreme Court to greenlight his tariffs after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit struck down the bulk of Trump’s tariffs, ruling the president can’t use emergency powers to justify levies imposed on dozens of trading partners.
Trump said would be on “the brink of economic catastrophe” unless the Supreme Court rules that the tariffs are legal.
“The President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in a statement, according to the Associated Press.
