Looks like Trump didn't delay the Harriet Tubman bill after all

Remember that racist plot hatched by Donald Trump and Steve Mnuchin to undo Barack Obama’s efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill? It was such an obvious case of racism and spite toward the 44th President that the media has been talking about it ever since. It was probably some sort of endorsement of slavery and it set race relations back in the country by decades.

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Except for one little problem. The Washington Post has quietly come out and admitted that it never actually happened. Turns out that the estimates given by the Obama administration for a 2020 release of the bill were never approved and the delay was already baked into the cake before Trump even took office. (Free Beacon)

Despite numerous liberal politicians and pundits excoriating the Trump administration for delaying the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, former Obama administration officials recently revealed there was no actual delay.

The Trump administration announced in May that it would not replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Tubman by the 2020 deadline announced by the Obama administration. “The primary reason we’ve looked at redesigning the currency is for counterfeiting issues. Based upon this, the $20 bill will now not come out until 2028,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin explained during a congressional hearing.

The “delay” was blasted by a number of high-profile Democratic politicians, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who called it “unnecessary” and “an insult to the hopes of millions.”

The “unnecessary delay that was an insult to the hopes of millions” according to Speaker Pelosi was confirmed for the Washington Post by “two Obama-appointed officials.” What’s more, the decision placing the release date around 2030 was made by the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence Committee back in 2013. (Remind me again who was President then?)

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The work that goes into making each new release of currency as hard as possible to counterfeit is laborious and time-consuming. Another Obama-era official told the WaPo that the previous administration’s 2020 estimates were “not grounded in reality” and they had been warned in 2015 that the deadline couldn’t be met.

So when Mnuchin came out and told Congress that the estimated release date was 2028, he was actually moving the deadline up by two years from what Obama’s own people were saying at the time. And the reason he gave (“counterfeiting issues”) was precisely the same reason that Treasury gave during Barack Obama’s tenure. Go figure, huh?

So this probably explains why this story is dominating the news on CNN this morning and lighting up everyone’s news feed, right? Oh, wait… I haven’t heard a peep about it yet.

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John Sexton 9:20 PM | November 01, 2024
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