President Trump’s tariffs became very real for importers last month as the government collected more than $17.4 billion in “Customs and Certain Excise Taxes” during April.
That was nearly double March’s haul of $9.6 billion, dwarfing the smaller spikes in revenue seen during Trump’s first term.
All told, the duties have deposited more than $70 billion into government coffers since Jan. 1.
“As Billions of Dollars pour in from Tariffs … we’re only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!!” Trump said on Truth Social Friday.
He could be right. April’s data will perhaps provide only a glimpse of what’s coming. The biggest tariffs — 10% duties on nearly every country in the world — took effect on April 5, with plenty of additional tariffs promised for the months ahead.
Read more: The latest news and updates on Trump’s tariffs
But also complicating the tariff revenue picture going forward are immediate signs of a drop in shipping volume in response to the duties. The Port of Los Angeles, as one example, is now projecting a drop in cargo volume of more than a third starting next week.
The large haul also comes despite significant concessions from Trump in April that offered a reprieve to giant importers like auto and technology makers and countries that had been in line for much higher tariffs before the 90-day reprieve.
Read more: What Trump’s tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet
Trump delayed additional “reciprocal” tariffs on more than 100 nations until this summer, with negotiations underway there. He has also promised new sector-specific tariffs to be announced in the weeks or months ahead on items such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.
The data is significant but could be slightly overstated, with the Treasury Department reporting both customs duties and certain excise taxes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a single category.
Excise taxes are different from customs duties, and more precise data is expected in the coming months, but the amount of those taxes collected by DHS historically is small.
A long way before it can be used ‘to reduce taxes’
Trump himself has often touted the surge of government tariff receipts, suggesting the US government is on its way to a repeat of an era of US history that ended more than a century ago when tariffs made up a significant portion of government revenues.
“We’re going to make a lot of money [from tariffs] and that money’s going to be used to reduce taxes,” Trump said on April 23. “We’re going to get big, big tax breaks.”
His aides have gone further. This week at that Cabinet meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick touted “the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars coming in.”
Read more: 5 ways to tariff-proof your finances
Stephen Miran, chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, hinted Friday in a Bloomberg television interview that internal administration numbers could be different.
“I would be surprised if we had tariff revenue that was less than hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” he said, even as he said elsewhere in the interview that coming negotiations could result in lower tariffs within weeks.
A White House spokesperson declined to offer any additional context on whether internal White House tariff revenues differ from those released publicly by the Treasury Department in their daily statements.
It all has led Trump to toy with the idea that revenue would allow the elimination of income taxes entirely. But while April’s surge in revenues is significant, it still represents barely a drop in America’s fiscal bucket.
As one example, the total tariff revenues in April represent less than a quarter of what the US pays each month just on interest on the national debt.
And all monthly government spending in March — the most recent full month of data that is available — was over $528 billion, or more than 31 times April’s tariff haul.
And that’s even before the tax bill currently advancing on Capitol Hill could authorize $5.8 trillion in new red ink in the years ahead.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from often claiming that tariffs will fundamentally change the US fiscal picture and sometimes overstating the publicly available numbers.
“The number is probably $3.5 billion a day,” he said on April 10.
He’s said $2 billion a day in other contexts — and has been fact-checked repeatedly — with April’s total tally including excise taxes and still representing about $580 million a day if it’s averaged out.
It’s part of a focus from Trump on the early 20th century — and the presidency of William McKinley in particular — that has long been an era of lionization for Trump.
Indeed, tariff revenue constituted about half of federal revenue in the 1890s. But that figure fell to below 2% in recent decades.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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