FYI for anyone who cares about logistics: the SCOTUS ruling coupled with the new tariffs make it seem like these tariffs are instant. They're not. CBP has to actually provide official guidance before they go into effect, and they have not yet done so. Based on past precedent, odds are that come Monday (or some time during the upcoming business week), official guidance
will be issued. The problem is that CBP issuing official instructions doesn't automatically make those changes go into effect either. Every 3PL firm, customs brokerage firm, and so on needs to wait on their brokerage software provider (i.e.
Descartes,
CargoWise,
SmartBorder, basically any software suite that directly interfaces with the
Automated Commercial Environment; formerly the Automated Manifest System) to update in accordance with new CBP guidance.
Last year, I did a
writeup on the Liberation Day tariffs. If you check the spoiler-tagged snippet at the very bottom, I rant extensively about how rapidly things changed, how customs brokerage software was failing to keep pace with all of the developments, and the ramifications therein. I wholeheartedly expect a repeat of this phenomenon to happen. Making matters even more annoying is how official guidance tends to be retroactive. So if Trump proclaims new tariffs to replace the reciprocal IEEPA tariffs, customs entries that were filed back in January or December will need to be updated to reflect the new instructions that CBP sends out. You know what that means? Compliance and operations teams are gonna be doing double time to make sure that both new entries getting filed match the new CBP instruction, and also resolving billing issues that emerge.
Fun fact about billing: 3PL as an industry is undergirded by private credit. i.e. you have regular business, so your company pays the duties on behalf of your regular customer, and then you bill the customer the cost of the duty back under NET-30/45/60/90 terms. Their accounts payable team then queues up the payment, notify your accounts receivable team to expect the payment in the next batch of ACH, and then they reconcile it accordingly. The tariff situation last year on Liberation Day was fucking
brutal because regular business where the duties were <$1000 suddenly jumped up an order of magnitude. At that point, 3PL firms
everywhere were basically scrambling to get all their highest volume customers to directly pay CBP duties via ACH. That's not even getting into how you and your clients can end up kicking the can down the road with payment processors like
PayCargo and
CargoSprint (i.e. payment processors that basically have huge credit lines open to logistics providers everywhere; basically PayPal Credit but for import/export and trucking).
Margins are razor thin across the board, but to that end? Everyone's always trying to charge their own markup to recoup vendor costs who charge their own markups because vendors have their own reality. It's basically turtles all the way down. I don't necessarily disagree with the SCOTUS verdict insofar as the separation of powers argument is concerned. What I take exception to is that this SCOTUS verdict had to happen
right as the state of affairs was starting to settle down from the chaos of April through August 2025. I appreciate Kavanaugh telling the Trump administration "bruh you wanna do the tariffs shit, use this loophole and not the other one," but I can't help but feel a Pandora's Box was opened that'll result in more overtime for the foreseeable future.
No skin off my nose; time and a half plus the OBBB's overtime credit means next year's tax returns will be even sweeter. Just figured I'd clue y'all in on this stuff.
