Jason Bolt estimates that his company Revant Optics paid nearly $600,000 under President Donald Trump’s rapidly escalating tariff policies over the past year.

Now the Portland-based glasses lens maker finds itself in a position familiar to thousands of companies nationwide that are figuring out how to recoup some or all of those levies after the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down late last week.

“They did not provide a path for going after refunds,” Bolt, Revant’s founder and CEO, said of the SCOTUS opinion. “But when and if that comes to light, we’ll purse a refund. We want that capital to reinvest in the business and to grow manufacturing here.”

How the recoupment process will work is anyone’s guess, and it could well end up taking years and become very messy, especially as Trump tries to impose more novel tariffs. The administration collected an estimated $175 billion in tariff revenue under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), before the Supreme Court put an end to it, ruling in favor of Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and other Democratic AGs.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, co-sponsored legislation Monday to require full refunds of the tariffs the court nullified that Trump had initiated under IEEPA.

“Senate Democrats will continue fighting to rein in Donald Trump’s price-hiking trade and economic policies,” Wyden said in a statement. “A crucial first step is helping people who need it most, by putting money back in the pockets of small businesses and manufacturers as soon as possible.”

Another route for companies seeking refunds is to file a claim through the U.S. Court of International Trade. Costco and 150 other companies had filed lawsuits in that court before the Supreme Court decision.

Nika Aldrich, a shareholder at Schwabe, said he has been fielding a “flood of inquiries” since Friday’s decision from companies that paid the tariffs.

“The general theme is to get a complaint on file with the Court of International Trade to preserve your rights and place your marker until whatever mechanism is ultimately established is established,” he said.

Where things get complicated is that a manufacturer or seller may not be the importer of record, which is the entity that pays the duties to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, making for layers of pass-throughs, with the consumer at the ultimate receiving end.

“It really depends where you are in that chain as to whether you’re likely to get relief from tariff refunds and how easy or hard it’s going to be,” said Steven Wilker, a partner at the Portland law firm Tonkon Torp. “For the clients I’ve spoken to, it’s got to be based on how significant it is to chase it. Is it material to my bottom line? Is everything I’m building or selling impacted by something that’s imported, such that I’ve had a tariff hit to all my inputs?”

Wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers alike could end up filing claims not against the government, but against the importers who paid the original tariff and passed along that cost.

Adding to the chaos, Trump has already rolled out a new 15% tariff based on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows that size tariff for 150 days for a balance-of-payments deficit. Those tariffs could also soon be challenged in court.

“It already is a mess,” Wilker said. “The government has the power to make it less messy or more messy. We’ll see which avenue they take.”

Meanwhile, business owners like Bolt are left scrambling about next steps and planning for a future in which the rules keep shifting, or as he put it during an interview on CNN, “It’s like dancing on quicksand and you can’t get your footing.”

Revant makes replacement lenses for sunglasses using mostly bio-based plastic and recycled polycarbonate, among other materials, imported from Japan, Taiwan and China. Then lenses, though, are manufactured at the company’s Pearl District plant. It also imports specialized machinery, including routers, from abroad.

During the Biden presidency, Revant paid a 9.5% tariff on imported materials, 7.5% of which was left over from the first Trump presidency, Bolt said. In the first months of Trump’s second term, those tariffs rose to 19.5%, then 29.5%, then 39% before they peaked at 154.5% on April 10, then fell a month later to 39.5%. Altogether, the rates changed a dozen times, Bolt said.

“Obviously, planning is nearly impossible, staying the course and trying to work with our suppliers and minimize impact to customers, while staying financially healthy as a business with that much change to cost of goods and materials,” Bolt said.

While Revant doesn’t disclose revenue, the nearly $600,000 outlay represents “a decent portion” of the company’s budget, he said.

“It takes dollars away from investing in new machinery and hires we would have made as an American manufacturer,” he said.

Revant, which employs 41 people in Portland and Eugene, mostly absorbed the extra costs, rather than passing them along to customers.

“So it directly affected our bottom line,” Bolt said.

While encouraging more American manufacturing, which the administration said was one of its goals with the tariffs, is laudable, Bolt said in the short term, tariffs “work against firms’ ability to grow here.”

He’s part of a coalition of 900 small businesses nationwide that is demanding “full, fast and automatic refunds of unlawful IEEPA tariffs.”

“We deserve our money back,” the group, called We Pay the Tariffs, said in an open letter to the president and Congress. “We have dipped into personal savings, taken out high-interest loans, laid off employees, and cut wages to cover costs that were never lawfully imposed. Now that the Supreme Court has struck down these tariffs, every dollar collected must be returned.”

Bolt said he’d like to get some stability so Revant can plan for continued growth.

“You can’t invest in the unknown,” he said.

Read the full article in the Portland Business Journal.