Please Hold for the Next Available Treasurer

I am sitting in a bagel shop in Ohio when the man at the counter stops believing in doors. Forgets how to operate them. Walks past the exit and into the rest of his life with a sesame everything in his hand and no idea how the lever works, because the news on his phone has just told him that the United States Supreme Court — the same nine ghouls who normally rule against you, your family, and your dog — has struck down the tariffs that have been eating a tenth of his business for the better part of a year.

This is February twentieth. The man's name is Richard Brown. He runs Proof Culture, a sneaker accessory shop, out of his home. He sells laces and cedar shoe trees and crease protectors to other people who care about laces and cedar shoe trees and crease protectors. For close to a year, he had been bleeding around twenty-five thousand dollars to U.S. Customs, on the theory that ten percent of his small business's revenue properly belonged to the federal government because the federal government wanted Chinese vinyl to be expensive. That money is now, technically, his again.

This is what he believes, standing there forgetting doors. He records a voice memo. “I forgot how doors functioned,” he says. “This is a win. This is going to be a hot mess.”

He is right about exactly one of those things.

What follows is the slow education of a man who has discovered that the federal government has many windows, and the window where they take your money is open twenty-four hours, and the window where they give it back is permanently closed for lunch. Richard Brown will spend the next seventy-something days in a kind of paperwork dementia. He will digitize purchase orders by the boxful. He will build an AI tool to track his shipping invoices. He will leave futile voicemails in three time zones with Chinese freight-forwarders who do not call back. He says, on tape, with the small bitter laugh of a man being slowly digested by a customs portal: “I don't want to be a customs broker when I grow up.”

The administration has agreed, in principle, to give the money back. The money is theirs to give. The court said so. The court said so in February. We are now in May. There is a portal.

There is always a portal.

The portal opened on April twentieth. Within about a week, U.S. Customs admitted in court filings that it had rejected more than a third of the claims that had been filed, citing “technical or data errors.” It also admitted that, of all the shipments for which it owes American businesses money, it had so far approved refunds on about a fifth. Twenty percent. An F. The federal government, asked to give back money that a court had ruled was not its money, was performing at the level of a high-school sophomore who had not done the reading.

Costco filed suit. Revlon filed suit. They have the kind of lawyers whose suits cost more than Richard Brown's house. They will get their money back. The system is built for them. The system is always built for them.

Richard Brown does not have those lawyers. He has his father. His father is named Richard Sr. and he is in the photograph on the NPR website packing boxes with a steady look that says he has been doing this for longer than the United States government has been pretending to issue refunds.

I want to be very clear about what is happening here. The court did not say the government may keep the money if the paperwork is too hard. The court said the government had taken the money illegally. The remedy for an illegal taking is the giving back. This is one of the rare moments in American life where the law sides, briefly, with the small importer in Ohio against the largest organism in the Western Hemisphere.

And what does the largest organism do? It builds a website. It builds a website it cannot operate. It sends Richard Brown — whose entire enterprise is plastic crease protectors for sneakers — into the same digital trench it has dug for Costco and Revlon, and it says: figure it out.

He says, into his recorder, on April first: “We're not equipped to deal with this. And it is a shame that the government recognizes that they're not equipped to deal with it to the extent that they're now passing it on to us. This wasn't my problem. And now you're telling me if I want my money back, figure it out. That sucks.”

That is the entire late-stage American economy in three sentences. Recorded in Ohio. Posted to NPR. Filed under business.

The Cato Institute, of all the unholy precincts to find oneself in agreement with, has run the math. The libertarians wrote, in a sentence that should be carved over the entrance of every federal building between here and Tijuana: the government will likely keep tens of billions of dollars it should have returned to importers months ago — money it promised the courts it would return if the courts invalidated the tariffs at issue.

Tens of billions. Not a typo. Cato said it.

The administration, meanwhile, has been rolling out new tariffs to replace the old ones, with new legal justifications, because legal justifications are the cheap part. The expensive part is the bagel shop. The expensive part is the parking lot. The expensive part is the digital line that does not move.

I have seen this trick before. I will see it again. The state takes from the small and refuses to give back, and when challenged, builds a website where the giving back is a homework assignment. Somewhere in the bowels of U.S. Customs, an automated voice is telling Richard Brown to please hold for the next available treasurer. The hold music is the national anthem. The line is the national line. He is not going to get his money back.

He will keep trying. He will keep recording. He told NPR, in the last interview: “I can't chase every fire, and right now, I feel like a firefighter.”

The fire is the building. The building is the country. The hose is full of paperwork.

This is going to be a hot mess.