Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced his long-awaited plan for a sweeping currency redesign on Wednesday that will put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. The plan will keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill while redesigning the back of the $5, $10 and $20 notes.
Mr. Lew spoke with reporters Wednesday about how the decision came together. The following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
On when these bills will get into circulation:
The plan has been—from the very start—that in 2020, which is the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, to have these things in their final design form. What I’ve already done is instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to move as quickly as they can to have the timeline as short as possible on each. The actual sequence will, as I’ve always said, be based on security considerations.
I’ve talked to the chairman of the Fed about this. We agree about two things: One is we have to make sure our money is safe and two is we should move this process as quickly as we can. And the two organizations that control it are the Treasury and the Fed.
On his decision to expand the redesign beyond the $10 bill:
I did this the old-fashioned way. We said we were going to listen to people, and we actually listened to people. There was a lot of legitimate concern about which bill a woman goes on the front of and what stories we tell.
Last summer, we had this idea that if you went bigger, you would be able to accomplish a lot of the things that we really would like to do. Tell a lot of stories. Honor more than one woman. And that opened up the window to doing the story of the suffrage movement on the $10, which is the next bill to come out, and putting a face of a woman on the $20, which will come after that as quickly as possible.
On choosing Tubman:
I must say that the choice of Harriet Tubman is something that when we started out, it wasn’t clear that that was where we were going to go. I was really struck by the number of comments and the emotion behind the comments supporting Harriet Tubman as the right choice.
There aren’t that many books about Harriet Tubman, but I read what I could read about Harriet Tubman. And the story of Harriet Tubman in so many ways is a powerful one about how an individual can change the course of this country by dint of their own actions and their own determination.
On keeping Hamilton:
I always was determined to keep Hamilton on our currency. That’s something I said last June, and I’ve said it consistently ever since. When I said we were going to listen, we really did listen.
A lot of arguments were made that a woman should go on a $20 because a $20 is so commonly used.…If you wanted to have a woman on the bills that people would see the most, it should be the $20. My reason for picking the $10…had more to do with timing, and when we opened the lens and said, “We can do more than one thing,” it gave me a way to both move immediately to get women on our currency, but also to think about a woman as the portrait on the $20.
If you only can have one thing that you’re going to do, it’s a different decision than if you’re doing a series of things.
On the printing process:
It is a very complicated business. Each bill has different security features. Designing those and producing those takes a lot of time. People think of it as a printing press, but if you think of it as a research and development project, it’s closer to what modern money really is. There are things you can’t see going on in money.
As Treasury secretary, your fundamental responsibility is making sure your money is safe. I decided right from the outset that there would be no compromise on safety. With that said, these timelines are not written into law. It’s a question of, How fast can the wheels move? There’s every reason to believe this can be speeded up and certainly we’re going to do everything we can to move it as quickly as possible.
Whether the $10 bill will still be printed next:
The $10 will be first. That’s a security decision that’s already been made. I can’t tell you with absolute certainty the next one. I certainly think the $20 is probably the next one. But that will be determined based on things I can’t know now, which is what the incidence of counterfeiting is and what the requirements are.
On critics who say he went back on his word by not putting a woman on the front of the $10:
I heard a lot of people who wanted a woman on the $20. I heard a lot of people who wanted us to reflect on more images and not fewer images. I heard a lot of people talk about suffrage. I heard a lot of people talk about Harriet Tubman. And I heard a lot of people talk about Alexander Hamilton.
It’s a decision that reflects a good deal of listening and trying to reconcile within constraints about security about how to manage it. Some people have said, Why don’t you change the order of our bills? It’s not an option to deviate from what the security of our currency demands.
On whether the next Treasury secretary could undo all of this next year:
This is a process that takes a very long time. And a lot of work has gone into it. The wheels are long in motion. We will continue the work on…getting this to the next stage of readiness. Obviously somebody could come in and make decisions, but the decisions now will be to take these images off. I don’t think somebody is going probably to want to do that—to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money….So I think by putting this in motion, we’re making a change that is likely to be enduring.
On whether the “Hamilton” musical influenced his thinking:
We made the general decision on the shape in July. I had an “aha” moment where I said, we’re thinking too small. We’re thinking about one square inch on one bill. The show has certainly caught people’s imagination….I think it’s a great thing….To find a way through popular culture to have people talking about our founding fathers is, I think, enormously important. That’s what this whole exercise is about.
What we’ve been doing in the currency and what they’ve been doing in the show are quite complimentary.…We’d actually gravitated in this direction pretty early on.
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