Donald Trump’s loyalists at the Treasury leaned on the government’s money-printers last year to draw up a $250 bill bearing his face, according to a report published Thursday. Two political appointees, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser Mike Brown, repeatedly pushed staff at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to create prototypes for the note.
Four employees at the bureau told the Washington Post that Beach and Brown pressed the idea for months, handing staff mock-up designs in August and September. One version put Trump’s face in the center of the note. Another design, pitched by British painter Iain Alexander, included a women’s liberation theme on the reverse fronted by Betsy Ross, and Alexander said he ran the concept past Trump himself. “He likes to call me his favorite British artist,” Alexander said.
The push mattered because the bureau was not dealing with a casual thought experiment. A law only allows deceased individuals to appear on cash, and the idea of a Trump note had already been floated in Congress last year as lawmakers tried to fit it into celebrations for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. That bill has not gone through, and former bureau director Larry Felix said such a measure “is not statutorily authorized.”
The pressure inside the bureau intensified around the same time Solimene was trying to hold the line. Patricia Solimene, the bureau director, warned that the note was not authorized and could take years to produce. She was abruptly reassigned to a new job at the Treasury Department on April 27, and in a farewell email seen by the Post, Solimene wrote that the reassignment was not her decision. “The buck stopped here,” she said. Brown has since been given her old role.
The Treasury Department has not denied the broader effort to prepare for the possibility of a Trump-linked note. A spokesperson said the BEP “is conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” and that, “should this legislative mandate be signed into law, the BEP is moving proactively to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation.” The department also said Beach had “never asked staff to print the bill before congressional passage.”
The dispute comes as Treasury has already embraced another Trump-linked currency idea. The department said Secretary Scott Bessent signed off on $100 bills bearing Trump’s signature, and the Post reported that those signed notes are now rolling off the presses in downtown Washington, D.C. That move underscores how far the administration is willing to go with Trump imagery on currency even as the $250 plan runs straight into a legal wall.
Felix, who once led the bureau, said the last $100 redesign took more than 10 years to complete, a reminder that even authorized changes move slowly. That timeline makes the new plan look less like an imminent redesign than a political test of how much the Treasury can do before Congress acts. For now, the answer to that question is plain: the $250 bill cannot legally move ahead unless lawmakers give it the authority it does not yet have.
