Small businesses in Ohio want the government to give back the money they lost to tariffs

Small businesses across Ohio are demanding their money back after losing revenue due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last week.

The problem with the demand seems pointless, given that Trump only doubled down after the Supreme Court’s decision, imposing a new 15% global tariff under alternative legal authorities.

Even though Trump has said many times over the years that tariffs would only benefit the economy, many Ohio companies are reportedly struggling, with suppliers and wholesalers passing import taxes directly on to them, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

“It seems like it will be difficult to calculate, as the rates have changed many times,” Julie Robbins, CEO of EarthQuaker Devices, an Akron-based maker of guitar effects pedals popular with musicians worldwide, told the Ohio Capital Journal.

“I do believe the administration will continue to add tariffs through other means, although they are extremely unpopular,” Robbins added. “The uncertainty is awful; it makes planning so difficult.”

However, not everyone was so dour on tariffs. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine indicated the state has benefited from the tariffs.

“As a manufacturing state, we’re seeing some new investment coming in,” DeWine said in the interview, according to WBNS-TV.

“It’s hard to tell sometimes. Do you attribute it to the fact that they now have to be investing more and don’t want to have the tariffs or not,” the governor added. “But my feeling is we’re getting a lot that coming in, frankly, because of those tariffs.”

According to the news source, EarthQuaker and many other Ohio companies found themselves squeezed between rising input costs and customers unwilling to accept price hikes, which made the situation even worse because these are not large corporations.

We Pay the Tariffs, a coalition representing more than 800 small businesses nationwide, issued a statement after the Supreme Court decision, seeking to recover the money these companies lost.​

“They’ve taken out loans just to keep their doors open,” Executive Director Dan Anthony told the Ohio Capital Journal. “They’ve frozen hiring, canceled expansion plans, and watched their life savings drain away to pay tariff bills that weren’t in any budget or business plan. Today, the Supreme Court has validated what we’ve been saying all along: these tariffs were unlawful from the start.”

The group pressed the Trump administration to create a “fast, efficient, and automatic refund process” to return the unlawfully collected tariffs.

Anthony argued that, since the court determined the levies exceeded presidential authority from the outset, the payments should never have been required in the first place.

However, it looks like the small companies won’t be getting their money back. Just days after the Supreme Court ruling, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would raise the newly imposed worldwide tariff to 15%.

“During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of Making America Great Again – GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!” Trump wrote.

In a previous post, Trump announced a 10% global tariff.