A look at a handful of proposals from this Congress and the last.
The second Trump administration has raised lots of tariffs and in so doing has brought a lots of revenue into federal government coffers. There’s been regular debate about what to do with all that money. Eliminate the income tax? Refund them? Payouts to all U.S. adults? All seem unlikely to happen, for one reason or another.
There are, however, a handful of legislative proposals made in recent Congresses there that would dedicate tariff and trade remedy revenues to specific economic, adjustment or budgetary purposes rather than allowing these receipts to simply collect at the U.S. Treasury. Here are some worth examining:
Resilient Communities Act of 2023, S. 3425, 118th Congress
The Resilient Communities Act of 2023, introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), redirects revenues collected through antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) enforcement into a Commerce Department fund for economic development in communities injured by import competition. That includes communities experiencing layoffs, declining sales or reduced shifts.
This proposal revisits an idea with a long history in U.S. trade policy: using AD/CVD revenues to help those harmed by unfair trade. Under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000 (CDSOA), commonly known as the Byrd amendment, the federal government distributed collected AD/CVD duties directly to eligible domestic producers for qualifying expenditures. These could include investments in plant and equipment, R&D, worker training, technology, raw materials and working capital. That system was ultimately short-lived; in 2003, the World Trade Organization (WTO) adopted findings that CDSOA violated U.S. obligations under the WTO Antidumping and Subsidies Agreements and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade reached i 1994. After the United States did not bring the law into compliance, the WTO authorized several trading partners to retaliate against U.S. exports. Congress subsequently repealed the Byrd amendment, with the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) explicitly describing the repeal as bringing the United States into WTO compliance.
The Baldwin-Cassidy proposal takes a different approach to the same pool of trade enforcement revenue. Rather than distributing AD/CVD collections directly to individual companies involved in trade cases, the bill changes the mechanism and beneficiaries from direct payments for affected producers to investments supporting trade-impacted communities.
Industrial Bank for American Manufacturing Act of 2026, H.R. 9912, 119th Congress
The Industrial Bank for American Manufacturing Act of 2026, introduced by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), would establish a fund in the U.S. Treasury available to the Secretary of Commerce to finance the expansion and modernization of U.S. manufacturing and strengthen U.S. industrial capacity, economic and technological security and critical supply chains. It could provide direct loans, equity investments and grants to eligible manufacturers for expanding, modernizing or otherwise improving U.S. operations in strategically important industries, as well as expanding the production and commercialization of critical and emerging technologies. Individual awards would be capped at $500 million, with Commerce required to notify the appropriate congressional committees before making an award exceeding $100 million.
The legislation would use existing Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports as a recurring source of capitalization for the fund. Each fiscal year, the fund would receive 50% of the revenue collected from Section 301 tariffs on goods originating in China, subject to an overall cap of $15 billion per year, along with any additional funding subsequently appropriated by Congress. The sponsors explicitly describe the proposal as redirecting tariff revenue that would otherwise go to the Treasury’s General Fund toward rebuilding the domestic industrial base.
The bill also places conditions and priorities on how the money would be deployed, including tying eligible investments to industries identified through federal supply chain assessments and to critical and emerging technologies. It also establishes restrictions intended to prevent recipients from using federal support for certain activities outside the United States or in countries of concern. The bill also contains labor and workforce requirements and gives priority to certain investments, including projects in areas that have experienced significant manufacturing job losses.
Build America Fund Act, H.R. 9954, 119th Congress
The Build America Fund Act, introduced by Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), would establish a “Manufacturing Sovereign Wealth Fund” designed to rebuild U.S. industrial capacity, reduce dependence on foreign supply chains, strengthen domestic control over strategic production, support advanced manufacturing and create high-quality jobs, particularly in regions affected by deindustrialization. The legislation envisions the federal government acting as a long-term investor in strategically important manufacturing rather than relying solely on traditional grants or tax incentives. The fund could make equity investments, loans and loan guarantees, with investment returns reinvested in industrial, technological and community development.
The bill would initially capitalize the fund with $310 billion in scheduled federal appropriations, while establishing several recurring revenue streams intended to support the fund over time. Most relevant to trade policy, the bill would direct all Section 232 and Section 301 duties on automobiles, as well as all antidumping and countervailing duties, into the fund. Additional financing would come from a 1% fee on mergers and acquisitions exceeding $1 billion, a 0.1% stock-trading fee on certain high-volume sellers, a stock buyback fee, fees imposed on certain manufacturers that offshore production, and revenue from increasing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 22%. The fund would also retain interest, dividends and proceeds generated by its investments, creating a mechanism through which federal investments could generate additional capital for future industrial investments.
A notable feature is the bill’s approach to federal equity investments. When the fund takes an equity stake in a company, the legislation provides for a federal “golden share,” giving the fund special rights intended to protect the government’s strategic investment. Those rights include authority relating to major corporate decisions involving offshoring, foreign sales, transfers of intellectual property, supply chain changes and mass layoffs. In other words: The government would not necessarily need a controlling ownership stake to retain leverage over corporate decisions that could undermine its domestic industrial capacity objectives.
TRADE Act of 2026, H.R. 10759, 119th Congress
The Tariff Relief for American Development and Employment (TRADE) Act of 2026, introduced by Rep. John James (R-Mich.), would create a tariff-funded program intended to preserve tariffs as a U.S. trade and national security tool while providing targeted assistance to American manufacturers, farmers, workers and supply chains that experience disproportionate economic harm from tariffs or foreign retaliation. The bill explicitly seeks to use a portion of tariff revenue to strengthen U.S. productive capacity; reduce the instances of otherwise competitive companies from cutting production or jobs because of tariff-related costs; and encourage domestic investment and reshoring.
The bill would establish a tariff impact relief program administered by Commerce in consultation with Treasury and USTR. To qualify, businesses would have to demonstrate substantial U.S. production or related domestic activity and document a material net economic injury associated with tariffs. Recipients would face domestic production and employment requirements, including restrictions on using assistance to shift production overseas. Assistance could support needs such as payroll, working capital, domestic investment, sourcing, worker training and productivity improvements.
The legislation would finance this assistance through a new fund, using customs duty revenue generated by covered tariff actions, rather than relying on general revenues. As such, the structure is intended to recycle a portion of the revenue produced by tariffs back into U.S. businesses and productive capacity affected by those same trade measures.
TRADE Fund, H.R. 3982, 119th Congress
Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) introduced H.R. 3982, a bill to establish a Tariff Response and Damages to Exports (TRADE) fund to provide assistance to U.S. agricultural producers affected by trade-related market disruptions. The legislation would authorize the president to deposit into the fund revenues collected from duties imposed on imports classified under chapters 1 through 24 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, which generally encompass agricultural and food products. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture would use the fund to make payments to producers affected by export competition, reduced access to foreign markets or other trade-related disruptions, including decreased exports, foreign tariff or non-tariff barriers and increased costs of goods used in agricultural production.
TRUST Act, H.R. 5153, 119th Congress
The Tariff Revenue Used to Secure Tomorrow Act, or TRUST Act, introduced by Nathaniel Moran (R-Tex.), takes a substantially different approach by directing certain tariff revenues toward federal deficit reduction rather than industrial investment or trade-related assistance. If the United States maintains a budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2026 and the subsequent fiscal year, duties collected in that subsequent year above the amount collected in FY2025 would be deposited into a trust fund and then transferred to the general Treasury solely for deficit reduction.