The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't

> meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

Assuming nobody looks at the requirements of the problem to write a single line of code in order to tool up to the task.

> CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

While ridiculous, from a technical standpoint, it's not hard to see how this scenario arises. On the one hand, there was probably pressure to implement the tariffs as quickly as possible. Consequently, there likely wasn't much effort put into the "what if we have to undo all this in a year" use case, because that wasn't strictly necessary to get the tariffs implemented.

On the other hand, now that the "we need to undo all this" use case actually needs to be used, they've gotta go back and solve the problem after the fact. Unsurprisingly, it's going to take a while to develop that solution.

I'm not excusing it, but I do think it's interesting to think about the technical and political issues.

Well Trump's track record of "No Plan-B" has historically worked out for him pretty well so far. He had ample reason to think the SCOTUS--which has been giving him a green light to act like a god-king up to this point--would have his back on this as well, in which case who cares if his backup plan turned out to be complete rubbish?

This is like a previous administration trying you re-unite children with their families.

I can't think of a constructive way to respond to news this dumb. Anyone have a silver lining?