The Trump administration has scrapped a decade old plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, ending one of the most closely watched redesigns in the history of American money. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the reversal in an interview with Spectrum News on Monday, and when asked directly whether the department still intended to move forward, he answered simply, “We are not at present.” He offered no further explanation, and a Treasury spokesperson declined to say anything beyond that.
The timing is what turned a quiet policy shift into a firestorm. Even as the plan to honor Harriet Tubman was being shelved, the same administration has signaled it is ready to move quickly on a brand new $250 bill featuring Trump’s own face, part of a push tied to the country’s 250th birthday. There is a legal wrinkle, since a law dating back to 1866 bars any living person from appearing on United States currency, which means a Trump bill would require an act of Congress. Bessent leaned on that distinction, noting that a new commemorative note is one thing while changing an existing bill takes many years of planning.
The push to feature Harriet Tubman began in 2016, when Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced she would replace Andrew Jackson, the seventh president and a slaveholder, on the front of the twenty. Lew said the decision followed thousands of responses from Americans who weighed in on who should appear. The redesign would have made Tubman the first African American on the face of United States paper currency and the first woman in more than a century, and the original goal was to have the new note in circulation by 2020 to mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
The choice carried enormous weight. Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in the early 1820s, escaped, and then returned again and again, conducting roughly 13 missions on the Underground Railroad and guiding about 70 enslaved people to freedom. She later served as a scout and spy for the Union Army, helped lead a raid that freed hundreds more, and became a leading voice in the fight for women’s suffrage. Putting that face on the nation’s most widely circulated bill, in place of a man who enslaved people, was meant to be a statement about whose story the country chooses to honor.
The plan stalled almost as soon as Trump first took office. He dismissed the redesign during his 2016 campaign as “pure political correctness” and floated the idea of placing Harriet Tubman on the rarely used $2 bill instead of the twenty. In 2019, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the new design would be pushed back to 2028, pointing to the time needed for updated security features. One of Tubman’s descendants, Ernestine Wyatt, told CNN that year that the delay “smacks of racist rhetoric” and read as a quiet way of saying the change would never happen.
The Harriet Tubman effort came back to life under Joe Biden. In early 2021, press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration was working to resume and even speed up the redesign, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen restarted the project, though she estimated the bill would not be ready until 2030. Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio, introduced legislation to force the change by 2025, but it never passed. When Beatty pressed Bessent for an update in May 2025, he told her only that his staff would get back to her. That answer now reads as a preview of Monday’s decision.
The reversal drew immediate anger from lawmakers who had fought for the change. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who has introduced legislation to honor Tubman since 2015, said she was extremely disappointed and accused Bessent of being more interested in what she called illegally plastering Trump’s image on a $250 bill than in a long overdue tribute to a woman. Coming alongside the administration’s broader rollback of diversity and inclusion programs, the quiet shelving of Harriet Tubman on the $20 lands as far more than a design delay. It reads as a decision about which Americans get remembered on the money everyone carries, and for now the answer no longer includes her.
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• Meta title: Trump Administration Drops Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Plan.
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• Meta description: The Trump administration has dropped the decade old plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, even as it fast tracks a $250 bill with Trump’s own face..
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• Image alt text: Mock up of the $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman that the Trump administration has now dropped.
