Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arguably the greatest Secretary of the Treasury in decades, blasted Democrats and Democratic Attorneys General for taking tariff money from the people and redistributing it to multi-million dollar corporations.
In February, Senate Democrats served the Trump administration notice that refunds should start flowing to U.S. companies who paid for the president’s tariffs.
Democrats do not want to punish China and any foreign countries that flood American markets with their cheap goods. They want to punish Trump and America for placing tariffs on foreign competitors.
The US Supreme Court gave Democrats a lifeline. The court ruled 6-3 that Trump lacked the authority to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs in support of American workers.
Following the SCOTUS ruling, FedEx, Target and other multinational corporations sued the Trump administration for a refund.
So Democrats got their wish and the money was stripped from US coffers and redistributed back to multi-nationals.
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Bessent was asked about the massive $1 billion refund given to Target.
Reporter: Target received a $1 billion refund for tariffs. What does that say about the size— besides the fact that it was done so quickly and efficiently, the refund— but what does it say about the amount of Chinese-made goods and foreign-made goods that our retailers are still selling in the United States?
Secretary Bessent: Yeah, well, what it says is that the Democratic attorneys general who filed a ridiculous lawsuit against this administration wanted the money to go back to the payer of record. So that is corporate welfare.
The American people had that money. And if I hear another Democratic legislator say— make the inane remark, the American people should get the money – the American people had the money in the U.S. Treasury, and we were forced to give it back. But using the 301s, which have survived more than 5,000 suits, that we will get that tariff income back.
But what you are seeing is that we don’t know the discount that Target got from the Chinese suppliers. So— You know, this is a corporate bonanza, which I said it would be at the time.
