The $40 billion tariff refund window is open — and the carrier capacity cliff is why you lock freight rates now

Week of July 1, 2026 · 2 items · 5-minute read

1. CBP is handing back the tariffs the Supreme Court struck down — but your refund runs on a liquidation clock

Earlier this year the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA-based tariffs, which means importers who paid them are owed the money back. As of June 29, 2026, that refund is no longer theoretical: CBP has finished the enhancements to its refund-processing system and is now accepting submissions through the CAPE portal (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries). The dollar scale is not a rounding error.

Phase one covers roughly $28.7 billion in refunds — entries flagged for later adjustment that are either unliquidated, or liquidated within 80 days of the declaration filing date. That 80-day figure is the whole game: it is a rolling eligibility clock, not a static list. An entry that ages past the window without being submitted moves out of phase-one eligibility.
Phase two is expected late July 2026 and covers finally liquidated entries — another $11.4 billion (about 6.9% of total IEEPA tariff payments). Once both phases are live, CBP expects ~95% of all IEEPA-tariff entries to be eligible for refund.
It is portal-only — no API is published. Importers and brokers submit entries through CBP’s dedicated refund portal; there is no bulk programmatic filing path today, so recovery is a records-and-submission exercise, not an integration.
What is excluded: entries already covered by drawback, entries under protest, or entries filed through improper channels remain ineligible under the current expansions and require additional work.

So what: if you imported anything subject to the IEEPA tariffs, there is recoverable cash sitting in your entry records — and the recoverable amount is knowable: IEEPA duties paid × affected entries, bounded by the liquidation-window eligibility. The procurement move is to inventory your affected entries now, sort them by liquidation date against the 80-day window, and get the near-window entries filed before they age out — then queue the finally-liquidated set for the late-July phase-two opening. For a should-cost or supplier-cost model, a supplier who recovers these duties has margin you can price into the next negotiation. Confirm your specific entry eligibility and the current phase-two timing with your customs broker against the CBP CAPE portal before filing — the window mechanics reprice as the phases roll out.

2. The driver-capacity cliff is why you lock freight capacity before rates move

Three federal actions are converging to pull carrier capacity out of the market faster than new capacity can enter — and the procurement consequence is a tightening freight market where rate leverage shifts to carriers.

A federal decertification lawsuit is live. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition filed a Petition for Review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on June 15, 2026, asking the court to compel DOT to decertify the CDL-issuing authority of New York and California. The argument leans on 49 U.S. Code § 31312, which the petitioners read as imposing a duty — “shall” — to decertify a state in substantial noncompliance. Federal audits reportedly put New York’s noncompliance above 55% and California’s around 25%. New York has already lost roughly $73 million in federal highway funding over the findings, though the action to date has stopped short of decertification.
The non-domiciled CDL crackdown is already removing drivers. FMCSA’s final rule (published Feb 13, 2026, effective March 16) limited non-domiciled CDLs to a narrow set of visa categories (H-2A, H-2B, E-2). On March 6, 2026, roughly 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs were cancelled in California alone. FMCSA also pulled ~3,000 CDL training providers from the registry in December 2025 and put another 4,500 on notice.
A “high-risk carrier list” could take capacity out overnight. The Transportation Intermediaries Association has petitioned FMCSA to publish a High-Risk Motor Carrier List — the “Obituary List.” As FTR’s Avery Vise put it, “If they publish that list, those high-risk carriers are essentially done for.” Stacked on ~88,000 authority revocations and a shrunken training pipeline, the capacity environment cannot self-correct quickly — new carriers cannot enter fast enough to replace what is leaving.

So what: this is a forward-exposure signal, not a headline. A contracting driver pool plus a pending federal list that can erase carriers from your approved base means two procurement actions now: (1) lock freight capacity and rates ahead of the tightening rather than riding the spot market into a squeeze, and (2) vet your carrier base for exposure — carriers leaning on non-domiciled drivers, carriers with authority or safety-rating flags, and any carrier that would land on a high-risk list. SpendRFX already scores carrier safety and authority status (carrier check); the CDL-decertification and high-risk-list dynamics are exactly the kind of forward regulatory exposure that belongs in a carrier-diligence pass before you sign the next lane. Confirm current CDL-rule status and any published carrier list against FMCSA primary sources before acting — this is a fast-moving regulatory picture.

Correction (October 14, 2026)

This issue said CBP’s CAPE refund portal began accepting submissions on June 29, 2026. That date was wrong. In a sworn declaration filed October 6, 2026 at the Court of International Trade (Freestyle World, Inc. v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, No. 26-01088, ECF 58, ¶3), CBP says the first phase of CAPE became available to importers and their brokers on April 20, 2026. June 29 added a feature: from that date, importers could also include entries that were flagged for reconciliation and were unliquidated (or liquidated within the preceding 80 days) but had no Reconciliation Entry filed (ECF 58, ¶7). The entries described in item 1’s first bullet (flagged for later adjustment, unliquidated or liquidated within 80 days) match that June 29 addition as CBP describes it. The original text above is unchanged. For where the refunds stand now, see Issue 13. Read CBP’s declaration (PDF).

Second correction (October 14, 2026). Item 1 also said phase two, covering finally liquidated entries, was expected in late July 2026. In the same declaration (ECF 58, ¶8), CBP says it deployed the functionality for finally liquidated entries, which it calls CAPE Phase 3, at 5:10 a.m. Eastern on October 6, 2026. CBP describes its scope as finally liquidated entries filed by plaintiffs for which the Court has ordered reliquidation. CBP notified the plaintiffs who had submitted a valid importer of record number by July 30, 2026, and says it will give further instructions to plaintiffs who submitted one later. The declaration gives no dollar figure for Phase 3.