Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon
In 2025, President Donald Trump not only raised US tariffs to their highest level since the 1930s but also repeatedly claimed that higher tariffs would fund many of his administration’s policy priorities. Whether bankrolling government handouts for American families and military personnel, offsetting the increase in the federal deficit created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), or even funding weapons for Ukraine’s military, there was seemingly nothing that tariffs couldn’t fund.
As Cato scholars and many others have documented, there are numerous legal, practical, and fiscal obstacles to fulfilling the president’s tariff-funding promises, not least of which being the inconvenient fact that Uncle Sam can’t spend the same dollar more than once. With this fundamental challenge in mind—and to simply keep track of all the president’s tariff promises—we’ve created the table below to keep track of every policy proposal that President Trump (and his cabinet) has claimed could be funded by tariffs, math and law notwithstanding.
As Table 1 shows, Trump has claimed in the last 15 months that tariffs could pay for ten federal government policies or programs. Some have already been funded through regular Congressional appropriations and general revenues, of which tariffs remain a relatively small part. The rest of these initiatives remain on standby because they’d require legislation from Congress.
Forthcoming legislation is unlikely in most of these cases, largely due to the fact that the tariff revenue, as Table 1 also shows, has already been spent. This reality comes before a potential Supreme Court ruling that could invalidate the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). According to the latest US Customs and Border Protection data, duties collected pursuant to IEEPA tariffs hit $133.5 billion through mid-December—60 percent of all duties collected last year. As various Trump administration officials have acknowledged, an adverse SCOTUS ruling would require the federal government to eventually refund most IEEPA duties collected, significantly reducing the amount of tariff-related funds that might be available to fund President Trump’s initiatives.
If we learned (or confirmed) something in 2025, it’s that the president and his cabinet believe in US tariff policy as the solution to every conceivable problem. Hence, 2026 will almost certainly bring more (fantastical) proposals for funding new federal programs and policies through tariff revenue. We’ll keep this table updated as the administration makes additional announcements.
