Trump’s name will be on some stimulus checks. Here’s why that hasn’t happened before

President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury Department to add his signature to coronavirus stimulus checks, which has raised questions about whether the checks will be delayed and whether the move is legal.

Trump started pushing for the unprecedented move in late March, The Wall Street Journal reported. He reportedly suggested adding his name to the checks to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin privately, according to The Washington Post.

Usually, the president does not have the authority to sign legal disbursements from the Treasury. It’s standard for civil servants to sign checks from the federal government, according to Citizens for Responsibility Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government ethics and accountability watchdog organization, according to CREW’s website.

That standard was set by Treasury Directive 16-23, which holds that “the Chief Distributing Officer, Bureau of the Fiscal Service, is delegated authority to sign, in that official’s name, checks drawn against all accounts of the Secretary of the Treasury,” the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s website says.

The Chief Distributing Officer can also delegate the authority to officers and employees of other executive agencies, but the officer does not have the authority to give that power to the president, according to CREW.

The caveat here is that Trump’s signature will appear in the memo line, below the title “Economic Impact Payment,” The Washington Post reported.

Newly printed checks will bear Trump’s signature, but about 80 million people are getting their payment directly deposited into their bank accounts, according to the Post. A primary concern about the new directive is whether it will “delay federal funds getting to those that desperately need them,” CREW says.

The Internal Revenue Service is now scrambling to change its internal programming to add the signature to the checks, which may lead to a delay, the Post reported.

“Any last-minute request like this will create a downstream snarl that will result in a delay,” Chad Hooper, a quality-control manager who serves as a national president of the IRS’s Professional Managers Association, told the Post.

The Treasury Department has denied that checks will be delayed because of the addition of Trump’s signature, according to the Associated Press. The department says the plan is still to issue checks next week, AP reported.

“Economic Impact Payment checks are scheduled to go out on time and exactly as planned – there is absolutely no delay whatsoever,” a Treasury spokeswoman said in a written statement obtained by AP. “In fact, we expect the first checks to be in the mail early next week which is well in advance of when the first checks went out in 2008 and well in advance of initial estimates,” she said.