U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios on Tuesday defended the Obama administration’s decision to replace Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Treasury secretary, with a woman on the $10 bill, and said Treasury was “not about to let this historic opportunity to feature a woman on our currency pass us by.”
Reacting to widespread online skepticism, Rios wrote in a USA Today op-ed that the plan to diminish Hamilton’s presence on the $10 was driven by the lengthy and involved process for changing any U.S. currency note.
“The schedule for redesign is based on a number of factors — most notably how secure a note is from counterfeiters, and also things like production volume and how much a bill is used,” Rios wrote. Rios is responsible for oversight of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing tasked with designing and producing paper currency.
The Treasury’s decision to put a woman on U.S. paper currency, a move sought by a large grassroots campaign, has received a mixed or even outraged reception because of the slight to Hamilton, creating an unexpected public relations problem for the administration.
Most of the groups that supported a woman’s picture on money wanted the $20 bill changed. The $20 portrays Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. whose legacy is tarnished by his mistreatment of Native Americans and complicity in slavery.
Criticism of the decision rose a notch when former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote that he was “appalled” by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s decision to change the $10 bill so radically.
“I was in government long enough to know that decisions like this have considerable bureaucratic inertia and are accordingly hard to reverse,” Bernanke wrote in his post on the website of the Brookings Institution. “But the Treasury Department should do everything within its power to defend the honor of Jack Lew’s most illustrious predecessor.”
Lew has said that Hamilton will remain on the $10 in some way, and Rios confirmed in her piece that one possibility being considered is to maintain two $10 bills: One with a portrait of a woman, and another with Hamilton. That proposed compromise, however, has so far not pacified the critics of the Treasury on social media and in print.
