"Much of the rhetoric in 2025 was built around the claim that ‘foreigners pay the tariffs.’ However, a study by the Federal Reserve shows the opposite: by the seventh month after a tariff is imposed, its cost is almost entirely passed through to American consumers via retail prices - a ‘100% pass-through.’ "So yes, the government did receive additional revenue, but that money was effectively taken from the pockets of ordinary American consumers rather than from the profits of foreign exporters. According to Bondarenko, "If tariffs are judged solely by the amount of money they generated, then they formally worked: the budget received hundreds of billions of dollars it would not otherwise have collected." She concluded that the tariffs "worked as a fiscal instrument but failed as the economic policy tool they were intended to be.