Trump Admin Removed Treasury Official After She Objected to Printing $250 Bill with Trump’s Face

There’s no position in the federal government with a shorter shelf life than “civil servant who is caught in between something Trump wants to do, and the legality of doing that thing.” If there’s one thing that the President and his closest squad of flunkies/enablers have learned in Trump 2.0, it’s to simply not give a shit about the presence of these types of career civil servants who raise objections along the lines of “but the law specifically forbids us from doing ____.” If that person won’t fall in line, they can simply be immediately replaced with someone who will! Then you just rinse and repeat until every single corner of the federal bureaucracy is 100% composed of Trump sycophants–you know, the types of folks who will sign off on the development of a new $250 piece of currency from the Treasury with the President’s face on it, despite both the literal law and basic, concrete practicality saying that such a thing is functionally impossible in time for the “America 250” celebrations this July.

And if the person you can relieve of their duties is a woman? Well, so much the better! Trump has, after all, developed a keen ability to solely fire and reassign the female members of his administration during his second term in office–as Jezebel once put it, “Only the Men Are Allowed to Be Drunk and Shit at Their Jobs in the Trump Administration.” That said, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Patricia “Patty” Solimene, the former director of the printing department at the The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, was either of those things. She was merely a key Treasury official and 24-year Army veteran who would have needed to get behind the idea of the Trump-faced $250 bill in order to produce the thing, who instead was bound by petty inconveniences such as “being aware of the law” and “knowing that it takes years to design safety features for a new bill.” According to new reporting from The Washington Post, which interviewed a number of confidential Treasury sources, she made the critical mistake of pointing those things out to Trump’s appointees at the department, and was subsequently and immediately removed from her job.

The head of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing refused to ignore the law and create a Trump $250.

So she got got.

Leaving was “not my choice,” wrote Patty Solimene.

A 24-year Army vet.

And the bureau’s first female director.

www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio…

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— Eric Umansky (@ericumansky.bsky.social) 11:28 AM · May 28, 2026

Said political appointees are U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior advisor Mike Brown, who according to the Post went out of their way in the last year to repeatedly pressure staff at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to begin preparing prototypes of the $250 bill that would bear Trump’s face. The only problem, of course, is that the law explicitly forbids living people from appearing on newly created currency bills, which has been the case ever since 1866. Codified under Title 31 of the U.S. Code, Section 5114, the so-called “Thayer Amendment” is a reference to an 1860s scandal in which a mid-ranking and seemingly narcissistic Treasury official named Spencer Clark made the executive decision to put his own face on a 5-cent currency note, causing outrage in Washington. Ironically, this exact reason for the law’s existence, to dissuade an egomaniac member of the U.S. government from venerating themselves on currency, is now exactly what Donald Trump is attempting to thwart.

The Trump appointees had already successfully leaned on the likes of Solimene to add Trump’s signature to newly printed $100 bills, as there was no specific law forbidding that kind of narcissistic meddling. But she reportedly drew the line at the creation of a new $250 bill, citing the years of planning and careful design and security features (to prevent counterfeiting) that are always employed when a new piece of currency is created. You know, the sort of thing that you would hope someone appointed to be the U.S. Treasurer would already be aware of?

“She had told them we’re not authorized to do this,” said an anonymous Treasury employee to WaPo. “We can’t progress any further, and all the stakeholders have not even met to discuss the next steps. Currency often takes six to eight years to produce a new bill, particularly one of such high value.”

Solimene, in response, was “abruptly reassigned from her post by Treasury management on April 27,” and in an email to her colleagues she stressed that she would leave with a “heavy heart” and that the choice was not her own. She told the other Treasury staffers that she had “never sacrificed the values or character of myself or the organization and always prioritized the U.S. Currency Program and the value each employee brings to the mission. The buck stopped here.”

That, it should not need to be noted, is the clear statement of a person with principles, which is obviously anathema to the entirety of the Trump administration. It’s not surprising, therefore, that they would quickly need to get rid of Solimene. The official Treasury statement, meanwhile, claims that U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach “never asked staff to print the bill before congressional passage,” despite the people interviewed by WaPo saying the opposite. Beach’s aforementioned advisor Mike Brown was subsequently installed as the head of the printing office. Sounds like the correct yes-man has been located!

An aspect of this story is that removing federal employees rights makes them less able to resist illegal actions.
Its illegal to put living people on currency. But the Trump administration just pushed out the public employee. This is what they mean by “The Deep State.”

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— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) 7:25 AM · May 28, 2026

There is indeed a piece of congressional legislation that exists that is intended to pave the way for such a gaudy, pointless piece of currency, but Congress has to date shown no particular interest in acting on it. It was introduced all the way back in February of 2025 by Rep. Joe Wilson (SC), and would order the Treasury secretary “to print $250 Federal reserve notes featuring a portrait of Donald Trump,” in a transparent attempt at currying favor by Wilson. Said bill was referred to the House Financial Services Committee and subsequently vanished off the face of the Earth, being more or less not taken seriously by anyone. It has received no hearings to date, meaning it would be unambiguously illegal for the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce prototypes of a bill that is not legal in the eyes of the law. The Treasury, in response to queries on this, has said only that it is “conducting appropriate planning and due diligence,” seemingly just in case the legislation is suddenly taken up and passed. That hasn’t stopped Republican legislators like Andy Barr from posing with mock-ups, though!

Suffice to say, the actual employees who work there aren’t buying it. As one said to WaPo: “These guys think you can just print something overnight and it’s going to work in an ATM. It’s just crazy. It takes years and years and years to produce these notes so they are reliable for the public.”

Part of me genuinely wonders if the likes of Beach and Brown are not complete idiots and are indeed aware of how new bills are produced, and instead hoped to pressure the Bureau of Engraving and Printing into producing a small run of “prototype” bills that would not be official U.S. currency, but instead a potent prop. You wouldn’t even need to tell Donald Trump that the bills aren’t official, you just present him with a wad of them that he can give out as gifts, assuming that Donald could bear to part with them–the man famously doesn’t like to spend any of his own cash. But you know he would love to hand a $250 bill with his face on it to a foreign head of state like he’s tipping a valet to bring his Rolls-Royce Phantom around. This might be the most “Trumpy” thing I’ve ever heard, in fact.

Truly, we’ve come a long way from the likes of George Washington, the man who resisted years of attempts to put his image on American currency while he was alive, observing that it would make him too similar to the British monarchs that the nation had so recently thrown off. But when you’re currently saddled with a U.S. President who delights in posting images of himself as a literal king, what else would you expect? Woe to the dedicated civil servant who happens to be standing in the way when that engine of narcissism comes bearing down on them.