President Donald Trump’s radical new tariff regime has brought in a surge of revenue from importers who must pay the higher duties. But is it enough to replace the income tax as the main source of funding for the federal government, as Trump administration officials have argued?
Treasury Department data shows that will be a massive stretch.
The United States has generated $46.6 billion this year from tariffs as of May 8, the latest data available — 46.3% more than the same time last year. Federal income taxes, meanwhile, brought in $2.4 trillion in 2024.
And the $14.7 billion difference in tariff revenue year-on-year is just part of the story. High levies can cause huge surges in revenue that later level off as trade patterns shift and businesses seek to lower costs along their supply chains.
But with Trump trying to undo the global status quo, there’s a lot to watch for. Even though plenty of attention has been put on the president’s gambit to impose — and then pause — a series of steep “reciprocal” tariffs against dozens of countries, the trade barriers he’s kept in place haven’t been this high in a century. Matters are even more complicated after Trump’s tit-for-tat escalation with China, America’s No. 3 trading partner, left tariffs on goods from that country at 145 percent.
Tracking the fluctuations in revenue over the coming weeks and months will help give a sense of what’s happening.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model makes that easy to do, cleaning up and analyzing raw data the Treasury Department releases each weekday. As that data fills in this chart, it creates a staircase we can search for clues to how Trump’s tariffs are reshaping trade flows and how much money they are bringing into U.S. coffers.
