A year ago, President Trump ordered double-digit tariffs on virtually everything the U.S. imports.
In a ceremony at the White House, he promised that jobs and factories would come "roaring back" to the country as a result, that consumer prices would fall and that April 2 would go down in history as "the day we began to make America wealthy again."
One year later, many of Trump's import taxes have been struck down by the Supreme Court. But the president remains committed to tariffs.
Here's where things stand on the first anniversary of "Liberation Day."
The government collected a lot of money but has to give half of it back
Tariffs are generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the federal government.
In the first five months of the fiscal year, the government raised $151 billion from tariffs — nearly four times as much as during the same period the previous year.
Most of that tax bill is being paid by U.S. importers, and in some cases they're passing the cost on to consumers. But six weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had overstepped his authority with some of the tariffs he had imposed, and now about half of the total tariff revenue will have to be refunded.
Customs officials are working on a plan to refund about $166 billion in tariffs that were wrongly collected, and they hope to have the details worked out by mid-April.
A boom in domestic manufacturing hasn't happened
Taxing imports was supposed to give a boost to U.S. manufacturers.
"We will supercharge our domestic industrial base," Trump said in announcing the tariffs last year. But manufacturing has been in a slump for most of the last year. U.S. factories employed 89,000 fewer people in February than they did in April, when the worldwide tariffs took effect.
The president boasts that foreign companies are investing huge sums in the U.S. to avoid his tariffs, and Trump often cites wildly inflated figures. In fact, official government tallies show that foreign direct investment last year was $288 billion — slightly less than the previous year and below average for the last 10 years.
Inflation remains elevated
Inflation has cooled considerably from its four-decade high in 2022 — but prices are still climbing faster than the Federal Reserve would like, in part due to tariffs.
Inflation in February was 2.4%, slightly higher than it was last April.
"These elevated readings largely reflect inflation in the goods sector, which has been boosted by the effects of tariffs," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters last month.
And economists warn that inflation could now worsen after the U.S. and Israel started a war against Iran, sending global energy prices sharply higher.
The trade deficit hasn't changed much
Imports seesawed last year as U.S. businesses tried to stockpile goods before tariffs took effect or whenever the import tax rate was temporarily reduced.
But over the course of 2025, Americans actually imported slightly more goods than they did the previous year, before Trump's tariffs took effect.
Imports of goods last year totaled $3.4 trillion, up 4% from 2024 — but exports totaled $2.2 trillion, a 6% increase. That helped lead to an increase in the total goods trade deficit, which rose about 2% to $1.24 trillion.
Import taxes are high, but not as high as a year ago
The average tariff rate soared on Liberation Day and the days that followed, at one point topping 21%. Goods from China were briefly subject to a tariff of 145%, which brought imports from that country to a virtual standstill.
But the Trump administration later reduced many of those import taxes, and the Supreme Court then removed some tariffs altogether. As of February, the Tax Foundation estimates that the average tariff on imports is about 10%. That's about half of what it was at its peak but still about four times as high as the average import tax at the beginning of last year, before Trump returned to the White House.
"By our count, tariffs changed more than 50 times between Liberation Day and now," says Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation. "There was just no way for businesses to plan."
York says that this volatility contributed to last year's sluggish job gains and the slowdown in economic growth.
"It's going to weigh on hiring. It's going to change investment plans," she says. "On top of the significant tax increase the tariffs caused, they also had this added uncertainty tax on top of that."
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