Trump Admin Drops Plans to Put Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill

Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

The US Treasury Department has dropped plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Spectrum News Monday that the department had ended a decade-old plan to put the Underground Railroad icon on the currency.

“We are not, at present,” Bessent told the outlet, when asked if the plans were still moving forward.

Bessent gave no explanation for the decision to abandon the plan.

The move comes weeks after reports emerged that President Donald Trump could become the first living person with their face on U.S. currency since 1866.

The Washington Post reported in May on efforts to put Trump’s image on a $250 bill.  Putting a living person’s image on currency was banned by law in 1866.

Bessent addressed the issue of putting Trump’s face on American money while tanking plans to include the historic abolitionist’s face on the country’s currency.

“The 250 requires an act of Congress, because you can’t have a living person [on U.S. currency], and it was to commit [sic] – for the 250th anniversary. For us to change an existing bill, whether it’s $1 through $100 takes many years in advance,” Bessent told Spectrum News.

The plan to feature Tubman was first floated in 2016, under then-President Barack Obama‘s administration. The change would have replaced Founding Father Alexander Hamilton on the $20 bill.

The original goal was to have Tubman’s image on the bill by 2020, but Trump pushed back the redesign during his first administration, prompting an outcry from one of Tubman’s descendants at the time.

Ernestine Wyatt, a relation of Tubman, told CNN in 2019 that the then-decision to push the redesign to 2028 “smacks of racist rhetoric.”

“I think it’s just a nice way of trying to say we don’t want this, we’re not going to have this, under any circumstances will we have this,” Wyatt said. “It’s just another delay and a diversion for what’s going on.”

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to Mediaite’s request for comment.

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