While corporate giants like FedEx and Costco sue for refunds on President Trump’s tariffs, smaller US businesses that have suffered more painful hits from the levies are also starting to take action, The Post has learned.
On Tuesday — days after the tariffs were smacked down last week by the Supreme Court — FedEx said it paid $1 billion in tariffs in 2025, sparking a 16% hit to its earnings. By comparison, Basic Fun — the company that makes Tonka Trucks, Lite Brite and Care Bears – said $7 million in tariffs last year tanked its projected earnings by 65%.
On Feb. 13, the $200 million toy company based in Boca Raton, Fla. sued US Customs and Border Protection in the US Court of International Trade to get its cash back, court documents show.
“We are really just waiting for clarity, hoping that we will be next in line to get a refund behind the [early] litigants,” Basic Fun Chief Executive Jay Foreman told The Post.
Liberty Justice Center, the nonprofit that won the SCOTUS ruling, filed motions on Tuesday in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the Court of International Trade to initiate refunds. A federal appeals court ruling requires the White House to respond to the motion by Friday.
Sara Albrecht, chair of the Liberty Justice Center, said the administration appears to be gearing up for a lengthy fight. The White House may delay its response until March 17, when the Supreme Court issues its final order on the records, she said.
On Friday, Trump griped, “We’ll end up being in court for the next five years.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CBS News, “We’ll see whether we have to repay. We will see what the duration of the repayment is.”
More than 1,800 companies — out of 301,000 that have paid tariffs — have already sued over $130 billion in levies they’ve paid, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal.
“They are signaling a fight, but I don’t know on what grounds they would base that on,” Albrecht told The Post, likening the question before the courts to “Do bank robbers get to keep the money when they steal.”
White House officials couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Thursday.
“The problem is that there is uncertainty on how this process will work and that was not alleviated when the president declined to commit to refund the tariffs,” said trade attorney Erik Smithweiss, who is representing a number of companies suing for a refund.
“It’s a very fluid situation and new developments are happening every day,” added Smithweiss, a partner with Grunfeld Desiderio Lebowitz Silverman & Klestadt.
VOS Selections, the New York City-based wine importer who was lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case brought by Liberty Justice Center, said it isn’t counting on getting back the $150,000 or so it shelled out on tariffs.
“Costco and a bunch of other companies sued, thinking they had a better chance of getting their money back,” VOS Selections owner Victor Schwartz told The Post. “Our [tariff payments] are gone for good. We won’t get that back.”
VOS Selections cut back on its inventory by 25%, Schwartz said. “It was a suck on our cash flow and we had no money to spend on expansion of new products.”
Basic Fun, meanwhile, imposed a hiring freeze last year and its employees got low to no raises and bonuses, Foreman said. “That’s the trickle down of tariffs,” the toy executive added.
Some companies, however, are reluctant to sue the government.
“There are companies that don’t want to get the tariffs back because they think the administration will be mad at them,” said John Vecchione, an attorney with the non-profit New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Exercise equipment maker, Echelon, saw competitors including Peloton on Jan. 20 file lawsuits over the tariffs.
“We are watching it, but we don’t really want to sue the government,” said Echelon chief executive Lou Lentine. “It’s millions of dollars and we’d love to get it back but we are not panicking.”
“We do not expect people to have to join a lawsuit or a class action to recover what is rightfully their refund,” Albrecht said in an email to The Post. The government agency overseeing the process — the US Customs and Border Protection “has always been able to issue refunds without filing a lawsuit.”
In 1998, US Shoe Corp. won a Supreme Court case arguing that it should not have to pay a port tax. Exporters who could prove they paid the tax received $730 million from the government over two years. At the time, a CIT judge set up an claims resolution procedure for the exporters.
Many small businesses said the tariffs have stunted their revenue growth because they couldn’t afford to bring in more products.
Sarah Wells Bags of Fairfax, Va. and Busy Baby of Oronoco, Minn. are in the process of filing lawsuits to collect the $40,000 and $50,000 respectively they laid out for tariffs. Owner Sara Wells laid off three employees — or half of her staff — last year after her diaper bag and baby apparel company lost $500,000 in sales due to tariffs.
“Last year was the first time in 14 years that I wasn’t producing anything, because I couldn’t afford to bring products into this country,” said Wells, who paused her manufacturing last March for the rest of the year.
Beth Beinike of Busy Baby took on credit card debt and cashed out her retirement funds to keep her baby supply business afloat.
“My first tariff bill was $32,000 and that did me in,” Beinike, an army veteran said. “I accumulated a lot of debt to keep the lights on.”
Both small businesses were on target to have a blockbuster 2025 with Busy Baby inking deals with Target and Walmart to carry its signature baby mats following a stint on Shark Tank.
Wells, meanwhile left her longtime manufacturer in China and set up shop in Cambodia last Spring after the president targeted China initially with tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.
“We started the year pretty strong and I was just putting my first order in at the Cambodian factory when they put 49% IEEPA tariff on Cambodia,” Wells said. “From then it was a rollercoaster.”
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