President Donald Trump has warned of disaster if the Supreme Court overturns his signature tariffs. For starters, it would unleash a bureaucratic nightmare involving reams of refund paper checks.

Should Trump’s country-based tariffs be deemed illegal, the US could owe the bulk of the $165 billion in customs duties collected so far this fiscal year back to companies that paid them. But they won’t have an easy time getting their money back; refunds are typically issued slowly with paper checks and while the administration could streamline the process to repay the funds en masse, experts fear that’s unlikely.

Trump has coveted the revenue from tariffs, saying they have made the country “very rich again.” The president and his allies have floated using the money to carry out policy objective

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