Despite promise from Biden, Tubman $20 bill long way off if current timeline holds

President Biden’s White House basked in praise from allies in its early days when it pledged to look for ways to “speed up” the process of putting abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 bill, replacing President Andrew Jackson, who owned enslaved people and forcibly relocated Native Americans.

But four months after taking office, there is little evidence the administration has taken any steps to accelerate the schedule set out years ago by a small agency within the Treasury Department.

Despite the growing national push to honor the contributions of women and people of color — and Biden’s personal promise to do so — Tubman is still not set to appear on the $20 by the end of Biden’s first term, or even a hypothetical second term. If the current timeline holds, it will have taken a full 16 years to realize the suggestion of a 9-year-old girl whose 2014 letter to then-President Barack Obama publicly launched the process.

That strikes some as an embarrassment.

“If we can put a helicopter on Mars, we ought to be able to design a $20 bill in less than 20 years,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in an interview. “It’s all about commitment.”

The Tubman battle has become a case study in the difficulty of marshaling the bureaucratic machinery of government, according to activists who’ve been working for years to change America’s paper money to reflect what they say are its current values.

The delay is notable in part because Biden relied on a coalition of women and Black voters to win the White House and promised to mobilize every element of government to promote gender and racial equity. There has never been a Black person on the U.S. currency, nor has there been a woman on a bill in the modern era, despite repeated attempts to diversify the currency.

Biden has made other efforts to update the nation’s imagery. He recently became the first president to visit Tulsa, Okla., in commemoration of a race massacre there. He ordered that the Oval Office be cleared of a portrait of Jackson, who oversaw the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears. President Donald Trump had installed the portrait of the seventh president, who is admired by some traditionalists for his populism and frontier image.

But removing the portrait has proved much easier than accelerating the actions of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a unit of the Treasury Department, which critics say displays scant interest in transforming the currency.

“They’re really happy to kick this as far down the road as possible, maybe until cryptocurrency takes over,” said Barbara Ortiz Howard, founder of Women on 20s, an advocacy group. “They don’t want to make the change, which I think is the only explanation for all of this nonsense.”

Treasury officials say changing the portrait on the $20 is not as simple as it sounds, largely because of the need for sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features.

The Treasury Department announced in 2016 that Tubman would replace Jackson.