Scott Bessent Has A Warning For The Supreme Court

Scott Bessent on Sunday warned that a potential decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down most of President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs would deal a severe blow to the U.S. Treasury. (Watch the video below)

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the treasury secretary conceded that his department would have to offer some rebates in the event that the high court upholds a lower court ruling against the president’s signature economic policy, acknowledging that such an outcome would be bad news for the White House.

“We would have to give a refund on about half the tariffs, which would be terrible for the Treasury,” Bessent said.

“If the court says it, we’d have to do it,” he continued.

Still, Bessent appeared optimistic that the justices will ultimately side with Trump.

“I am confident that we will win at the Supreme Court,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker.

“But there are numerous other avenues that we can take. They diminish President Trump’s negotiating position,” he added, without offering any further details.

After an appeals court said most of the tariffs Trump applied under an emergency powers law — the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act — were illegal, the Trump administration last week asked the Supreme Court to swiftly reverse the ruling.

“That decision casts a pall of uncertainty upon ongoing foreign negotiations that the President has been pursuing through tariffs over the past five months, jeopardizing both already negotiated framework deals and ongoing negotiations,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote to the court. “The stakes in this case could not be higher.”

The appeals court ruling, which left the import taxes in place until mid-October, does not apply to tariffs covering foreign steel, aluminum and cars and also doesn’t cover the import taxes the president applied to Chinese goods during his first term in office, among other things.

Meanwhile, Bessent dismissed concerns about the state of the U.S. economy after Labor Department figures Friday showed that U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs last month, falling short of the about 80,000 jobs economists had predicted for August.

“President Trump was elected for change, and we are going to push through with the economic policies that are going to set the economy right,” he said. “I believe by the fourth quarter, we’re going to see a substantial acceleration.”