Biden administration plans to 'speed up' effort to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill
President Joe Biden's administration announced Monday it plans to revitalize the effort to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
"It's important that our notes -- our money -- reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a White House press briefing Monday. "So we're exploring ways to speed up that effort."
Psaki noted the U.S. Treasury Department -- led in the Biden administration by a woman, Janet Yellen, for the first time in history -- has already picked back up the effort to put Tubman -- an African American woman celebrated for her work freeing enslaved people during the Civil War -- on new $20 bills, an effort that was delayed under former President Donald Trump.
"The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on front of the new $20 notes," Psaki told reporters, noting that specifics on timing will come from the Treasury Department.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, also announced Monday that she is reintroducing in Congress the Woman on the Twenty Act of 2021, which would require any $20 bill printed after 2024 to "prominently feature" a portrait of Tubman.
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"For several years, I worked directly with the Department of Treasury to plan the release of the new $20 design featuring Harriet Tubman to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment," Beatty said in a statement. "The American people want our currency to better reflect the diversity of our great country."
"I look forward to working with the Biden-Harris administration, including the first-ever female secretary of treasury, Janet Yellen, to put a woman on the twenty and make the Tubman twenty a reality," she said.
In 2016, President Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced plans for Tubman to replace former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, as part of an effort to get more women on U.S. currency.
The redesign was set to go into effect in 2020.
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While campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Trump described the effort to put an image of Tubman on the $20 bill as "pure political correctness."
Trump's treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, told lawmakers in 2019 that he wasn't planning on putting Tubman on the $20 bill in 2020 and that a redesign of the currency would not be issued until 2028.
"The ultimate decision on a redesign will most likely be another secretary later down the road," Mnuchin said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019.
Just a few days after that hearing, House Democrats protested on the steps of the Treasury Department, rallying for a congressional measure that would require $20 bills to include an image of Tubman.