The claim is about revenue, so the check is arithmetic.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that combining Sections 122, 232 and 301 'will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026,' that rates return 'back to exactly where they were,' and that 2026 brings only 'a de minimis decline' [2].
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget scored the replacement on July 23. The 60-economy Section 301 forced-labor tariffs: $900 billion through fiscal 2036. The Brazil Section 301 tariffs: $15 billion. The Canada Section 338 tariffs: $40 billion [1]. About $950 billion.
What they replace is $1.7 trillion in IEEPA revenue lost to the February 2026 Supreme Court ruling [1].
Nine hundred and fifty billion against seventeen hundred billion is 55.9 percent - a shortfall of roughly $750 billion. CRFB projects debt reaching 122 percent of GDP by 2036 against a 120 percent baseline, and writes that 'fully replacing that revenue would require additional tariffs, other revenue increases, spending reductions, or some combination of the three' [1].
The near-term half is checkable too. Customs and Border Protection collected roughly $166 billion under IEEPA and had accepted about $121.75 billion in refunds, certified and pending, as of July 10 [2]. That is 73.3 percent of the money going back out.
The fairness point has to be made, because Bessent scoped his claim to 2026 and CRFB scores a ten-year window. A one-year 'de minimis decline' is a defensible thing to say about 2026 alone. It is not what 'virtually unchanged' conveys when the same tariffs are defended as a way to pay down debt over a horizon [3] - and the refunds already flowing undercut the near-term half on its own.
A second claim fails without any scoring at all. 'Back to exactly where they were' cannot be true of the structure: the replacement is a near-uniform 10 percent and 12.5 percent across roughly 60 economies. Uniform rates cannot reproduce country-specific IEEPA rates, whatever they raise.
