Even after scoring a huge victory against President Donald Trump’s tariffs in federal court last week, David Levi still isn’t sure if his small business will survive the trade war.
“It’s just been exhausting how uncertain it is,” Levi, who started MicroKits in 2020 to get more kids interested in the hands-on science of electrical engineering, tells Reason.
Imports are essential to the kits that Levi and his one employee assemble in a warehouse near Charlottesville, Virginia. For example, a kit that teaches kids how to build a small theremin requires a circuit board, resistors, capacitors, bits of wire, and plastic molding to hold batteries and other pieces in place.
“I don’t have millions and millions of dollars to spin up my own circuit board assembly line, and plastic mold injection, and everything,” Levi says.
Though he is running a small, niche operation, Microkits is in many ways a microcosm of American manufacturing. Levi provides the ideas and designs, and he oversees the final assembly of his products in America, but those products combine parts sourced from around the globe. About 60 percent of his inputs come from China, Levi says, which puts him more or less in line with American manufacturing as a whole. More than half the imports to the U.S. are raw materials, intermediate parts, or equipment—the stuff that manufacturing firms need to make things—rather than finished goods. It is those supply chains that the trade war is jeopardizing.
He’s had to put on hold plans to offer a new kit that would allow kids to build a musical synthesizer powered by the electrical current found in bananas (which are also getting more expensive, thanks to tariffs).
“It’s not a question of ‘oh do you build the kits entirely in America or with international parts?'” Levi says. “It’s a question of do you build the kits with international parts versus you don’t build these science kits at all. And then, instead of kids getting a cool science project at Christmas, they just get another app on their iPad that they already have.”
Levi and MicroKits are plaintiffs in the lawsuit that briefly blocked many of Trump’s tariffs last week when the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that the president did not have the legal authority to impose those tariffs. Less than 24 hours later, that injunction was put on hold by a federal appeals court—leaving the tariffs in place, for now, and business owners like Levi in limbo.
Next week will be pivotal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit gave the Trump administration until Monday to file its briefs for the next stage of the legal process.
A full ruling on the merits of the case could take weeks or months, but the first thing the appeals court will have to decide is whether to maintain the temporary order blocking the lower court’s injunction against the tariffs, says Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing Levi and several other business owners in the lawsuit.
“I’d be shocked—and disappointed, honestly—if they don’t make a decision [regarding the stay] before Friday of next week,” Schwab tells Reason. “So by next week at this time, hopefully we’ll know.”
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