International- The Biden administration has said it would "speed up" efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
- But their hands may be tied - the
currency redesign process is scheduled for 2030 at the earliest. - Redesigning bills takes years or decades due to complex security and anti-counterfeiting features.
Last week, the United States Mint announced that the writer Maya Angelou and the astronaut Sally Ride would be the first American women honored on the backs of quarters circulate from 2022 to 2025. The
But redesigning cash is far different than minting coins, and Americans are likely still years away from seeing the famous abolitionist on $20 bills.
In fact, it will most likely be 2030 before a Tubman bill enters circulation.
Why the delay? It turns out, it can take decades for the United States to redesign a single currency note. The $20 bill redesign has been planned since 2013 - years before the Obama administration even selected Tubman to grace the front.
A government committee, known as the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence Steering Committee, decided in 2013 that most currency bills would undergo major redesigns to add new security features and prevent counterfeiting attempts.
The $10 bill was set to be redesigned in 2026, the $50 in 2028, the $20 in 2030, the $5 in 2032 to 2035, and the $100 in 2034 to 2038.
That timeline is optimistic, too. It assumes no new counterfeit threats or technology issues suddenly crop up and delay the process, according to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
The Biden administration promised in January that the White House was "exploring ways to speed up" efforts to put Tubman on the front of the $20 note. But thanks to a complex redesign process and thorny bureaucratic issues, it's still just a distant possibility.
The Tubman on 20 delay isn't a racist conspiracy
Activists have been frustrated with the lengthy timelines, not only in printing Tubman's image on the $20 bill, but in improving currency access for visually impaired people.
The founder of Women on 20s, the group responsible for a petition that selected Tubman for the $20 bill, told Insider she was hopeful the Biden administration could find a way to put the redesigned bills in circulation by the end of 2024.
"Come on, it's 2021. We built Olympic stadiums, we put the rover on Mars, we came out with a [COVID-19] vaccine - we rolled it out in a year," Women on 20s founder Barbara Ortiz Howard said. "We could do this if we want to do it, and we need to want to do it."
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing indeed started working on a new $20 bill design featuring Tubman in 2016, according to The New York Times, and then-Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew promised it would be unveiled in 2020. But no design was ever formally released.
Though the Trump administration was accused of scrapping plans to feature Tubman on the bill - and President Donald Trump himself called the effort "pure political correctness" - then-Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin said the decision was out of his hands entirely. The redesign timeline had been established back in 2013, and design choices for the $20 bill would be made by a future treasury secretary much closer to the redesign date.
The Treasury Department's inspector general's office confirmed in a 2020 audit report that the 2013 timeline established by the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence Steering Committee had never included or endorsed a 2020 redesign release date for the $20 bill.
The investigation also criticized Lew for promising in 2016 that a design would be released by 2020. In fact, releasing a design 10 years before printing the bill would pose a "huge risk," the report said.
It can take 10 years to develop a single security feature on a bill
Neither the Treasury Department nor the Bureau of Engraving and Printing responded to Insider's requests for comment on whether it's possible to speed up the timelines. The White House didn't provide comment, and instead referred Insider to the Treasury Department.
"It takes time to develop security features, and there is no guarantee the security feature will work until testing and design are complete," the Treasury Department's inspector general's office wrote in an audit report published last year. "It can take six to 10 years to bring a security feature to completion, as there are multiple factors involved, including acquiring and implementing equipment needed to test the security features and production equipment to implement the new security feature into a note."
For instance, the $100 bill released in 2013 took more than a decade to redesign after its previous redesign in 1996. Since it's the most widely used American bill outside the US, the anti-counterfeiting measures were a top priority.
Among the security features on the $100 bill are a three-dimensional blue security ribbon, a color-changing image of a bell in the inkwell, color-changing ink in the "100" numeral in the lower right corner that shifts in the light, and a faint watermark image of Benjamin Franklin visible from both sides of the bill.
Other factors complicating the redesign process for the other bills are accessibility features for visually impaired people, such as tactile features and high-contrast numerals to make it easier to distinguish bills from one another.
A new currency-printing facility is underway in Maryland, but isn't expected to be constructed and ready for printing until 2025, according to the magazine Coin World.
In the past, redesigned bills aren't unveiled to the public until six months before circulating them, according to the report. Those six months give the public enough time to learn about the new security features, without giving potential counterfeiters too much of a heads up about the new designs.
Beyond that, the $20 bill hadn't yet undergone the banknote development process where the design concept would be finalized, and therefore couldn't have been unveiled in 2020, the report said.
"It was questionable whether the concepts proposed could even be manufactured since a significant amount of work was needed to complete the security features," the report said.
As for the activists with Women on 20s, they're not giving up on seeing a host of newly redesigned bills by the end of Biden's first term. They've created a new petition urging Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to move quickly on redesigning all bills.
"The very fact that we're not advancing the process is impacting the security of our bills," Howard told Insider. "Our security is at risk every day that we don't have upgraded currency."