autographs bought and sold,” reads the business card Ed Bomsey hands me in his basement office in Northern Virginia. It’s an obsession, he tells me, that began in the mid-1960s on the Bronx campus of New York University. Newly elected to student government, Bomsey found an old letter declining an invitation to visit.

“I said, ‘Hey, guys, we have this from Harry Truman!’ ” he recalls. “One guy said, ‘Take it.’ ” Bomsey did. Today, he still treasures that letter, secure in the knowledge that the signature on it came directly from the former President’s hand.

“Truman,” Bomsey explains, “did not use an autopen.”

A mechanical device capable of faithfully replicating a person’s signature, the auto­pen has been used by every President since. Lately, it’s been the subject of considerable controversy: Joe Biden is facing multiple investigations and the ongoing scorn of his successor, Donald Trump, for using an autopen to sign scores of pardons and commutations in his final days in office. And Biden is hardly the first President to take flak for the practice. In 1965, famed philographer Charles Hamilton rocked the autograph world when he pulled back the curtain on John F. Kennedy’s auto­penning, in a scathing book titled The Robot That Helped to Make a President. A decade later, Hamilton decried the auto­pen as an “accursed device.”

“For us collectors and dealers, it is,” Bomsey says. Indeed, only wet-signature documents make the wall of fame in his home office—the centerpiece of which is a government appointment marked with George Washington’s signature, featuring a distinctive small circle floating above the period after his first-name initial of G. “I told my wife,” Bomsey says, “ ‘If the house catches fire, grab that first.’ ”

Yet while robot signatures are a bane to collectors, Bomsey sees plenty of value in automation—especially at the White House. Before he went into the autograph trade full-time, he was a lawyer working for an energy trade association downtown. “If the President was signing every document put in front of him,” he says, “we’d have a dead President in 48 hours.”

In a city defined by power—and the endless paperwork that power produces—Presidents aren’t alone in relying on auto­pens. But who exactly uses the machines, and for what kinds of documents, is something Bomsey calls “one of the best-kept secrets in Washington.” He pulls out a thick white binder, dropping it on his coffee table with a heavy thunk. This is his “encyclopedia,” a compendium of autopen samples compiled over decades. Bomsey calls it a necessary evil: “You find out there’s a new one when you sell something and somebody says, ‘Hey, that’s an autopen,’ ‘Well, send it back.’ ” Says Bomsey, “Knowledge is power.”

Inside are letters from a who’s who of American political history, including Robert F. Kennedy, former cabinet secretary George Romney, and even Martin Luther King Jr. There’s a flourish-filled signature from Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. There are signed headshots aplenty, one of them from Jody Powell, press secretary in the Carter White House. Why would he need an autopen? Having your own, Bomsey says, is “a sign of prestige.”

Most congressional offices have an auto­pen, Bomsey says, “whether they choose to use it or not.” No job, it seems, is too small. Bomsey hands me a typewritten note. It looks like an informal message between friends. “Nancy and I,” the note begins, “are still laughing over that Carter joke.”

Bomsey points at the “Ronald Reagan” sign-off at the bottom: “That’s machine.”

During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson was an early user of the newfangled “polygraph,” an autopen antecedent that connected two writing instruments and allowed users to make a copy of a document as they crafted it. “I could not, now therefore, live without” the device, he wrote. It wasn’t until World War II, however, that automating signatures became government practice. To help the Navy quicken the pace of production, a 21-year-old machinist at Alexandria’s Naval Torpedo Factory named Robert De Shazo Jr. made the first commercially successful autopen, modernizing the design of a 1930s device called the Robot Pen.

For busy officials in a rapidly growing bureaucracy, the device was a godsend. Leaving the war effort, De Shazo bought the company that had created the Robot Pen and renamed it the International Auto­pen Company—which for decades supplied the nation’s capital with machines. Following De Shazo’s death in 1994, tax issues and business conflicts eventually led to his children splitting from the firm—now known as Damilic—and starting a competitor, Automated Signature Technology.

Today, the two companies are housed in remarkably similar two-story office parks alongside automotive shops in DC suburbs: one in Rockville, the other in Sterling, a 40-minute drive apart. The companies have engaged in a long-­running battle over who gets to use the term “autopen,” a fight that the US Patent and Trademark Office has declined to resolve, in part be­cause that name is shared by a popular insulin-­injecting device.

I reached out to both companies. Neither wanted to talk. When I mentioned this to Bomsey, he wasn’t surprised. No one, he says, wants to be outed as an autopen user—especially not government clients. “Insofar as they’re concerned,” he says of the firms, lifting his hands and shrugging, it’s “ ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

Autopens are everywhere in Washington, reportedly used by the military, cabinet agencies, the Social Security Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Food and Drug Administration. But officials are loath to discuss their use. In his book, Hamilton quotes Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger—horrified by the notion that anyone other than the President was in command—exclaiming, “There is no such machine!” Bill Clinton’s director of letters and messages once said that the presidential autopen was the “second-most-guarded thing in the White House” after the President. When the FDA rolled out its autopen machine for a Take Your Children to Work day, it was reportedly escorted by an armed guard.

Despite their aura of mystery, auto-pens aren’t much to look at: Picture a desktop printer sprouting a pair of spider-like metal arms, connected like an accordion, which come together to hold a pen. In the past, the machines relied on Plexiglas templates to mimic signatures. Those had the disadvantage of warping over time: In the 1970s, New York governor Hugh Carey complained that his robotic signature, with a swashbuckling crossbar from the first letter of his first name reaching nearly to the first letter of his last, no longer looked like the real thing.

Today, many autopens use USB drives or credit-card-size plastic cards to store signatures. They’re generally capable of holding a wide variety of pens, too—and, unlike the earliest models, are small enough not to get inadvertently bumped by careless staffers while scribbling out names. Modern machines, which reportedly cost $2,000 to $10,000 and can produce up to 500 signatures an hour, also let users deploy a variety of signature templates—a more loosely written nickname for “personal” correspondence or a tighter signature, complete with middle initial, for more formal documents. Reagan reportedly had 22 different signature templates, including “Ron” and “Dutch.” “I know, in some offices, the officeholder will tell the secretary, ‘Use number three on this,’ ” Bomsey says.

All of this has made sussing out real-­deal signatures harder—but, philographers say, not impossible. Handmade signings flow from one letter to the next, varying pressure, reflecting hesitations, and even capturing distractions. They contain telltale signs of life: Charles Hamilton, the JFK book author, wrote that the President’s authentic signature came across as “virile.”

Autopens are different. “Flat and dead,” says Steve Zarelli, an autograph verifier from New York who specializes in the US space program. (Astronauts are notorious autopenners, with NASA running a robust proxy-signing service to meet public demand.) Moreover, machines are notoriously consistent from one signing to the next, a pattern that experts can detect using vellum overlays, matching signatures to previous examples. Humans can’t pull off such repetition. Write your name a hundred times, Bomsey says, and you’ll get “a hundred completely different examples.”

In 2011, Barack Obama made history when he became the first President—as far as we know—to use an autopen to sign a bill into law. He was in Europe at the time, and the Patriot Act needed to be extended, immediately.

To comply with the law, Obama relied on a legal opinion from the George W. Bush administration, which said that it was fine for Presidents to use the device to sign bills, with one condition. “We emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill, only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill,” the opinion reads.

Not everyone was happy. Tom Graves, a Republican House member from Georgia, asked Obama to confirm that he’d actually read the text of the bill before his staff fired up the robot pen. Graves also tried to give the White House homework—asking the President to explain, in writing, his constitutional authority to delegate bill-signing to a machine.

This wasn’t a novel way to try to score political points. Historically, suggesting that staffers were running wild with the autopen has been a way of branding their bosses as asleep at the wheel. In 1980, North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms chided Jimmy Carter over a letter the President had sent to the leader of Panama on the future of the Panama Canal. The missive was so misguided, Helms said on the Senate floor, that the only explanation was that “someone in the bowels of the State Department just put some boilerplate language” and sent it to the White House, then “they used the autopen and signed the President’s name to it, and there it went.”

Sometimes, scenarios like that are uncomfortably close to the truth. In 1989, an executive assistant at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Deborah Gore Dean, was investigated by Congress over allegedly running the agency under an indifferent secretary via autopen; Dean was eventually convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government. The previous year, a White House staffer had auto­penned Vice President George H.W. Bush’s name on a controversial letter backing ethnic Albanians during the fraught conflict in Kosovo, producing pushback from Serbian American organizations and the government of the former Yugoslavia. (The staffer later said he didn’t recall doing it.) In a 2000 New York Times op-ed, former South Dakota Republican lawmaker Larry Pressler confessed that US senators like him sometimes couldn’t remember the content of letters bearing their signatures. For one thing, he said, “trusted aides” write most of those letters. More to the point, “everyone knows senators don’t sign the vast majority of their letters; an autopen does that.”

Government officials have—very occasionally—attempted to curb autopen use. After taking over the FBI in the 1970s, William H. Webster tried to cut down on the rampant practice under former longtime director J. Edgar Hoover by requiring officials to sign their own names instead of using Webster’s robot signature. And in 2015, Senator John McCain, upset over delays in the Navy’s delivery of nuclear-­powered aircraft carriers, inserted into a defense spending bill a requirement that the Secretary of the Navy personally sign off on any further changes, “not autopen.”

Mostly, though, the instrument’s use has continued unabated. Occasionally, this creates a temptation to blame it on the machines: Vice President Dan Quayle once faulted an autopen-­wielding staffer for signing off on a letter requesting better treatment for an incarcerated GOP donor. Usually, though, officials abide by a Washington norm: Own thy autopen. In 1984, New York Times columnist William Safire confronted Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige over an in-house writing guide Safire found tendentious. “Did I write that?” Safire recalled Baldrige saying. Told his signature was on the document, the Commerce Secretary sighed. “If it came out of my shop, I’m responsible,” said Baldrige. “Sock it to me.”

Just by their physical nature, handwritten signatures make an implicit statement. I was here. I approved what’s written. In politics, that packs a punch. On the bottom of a bar tab, John Hancock’s oversize signature could be read as evidence of main-character syndrome; on the Declaration of Independence, written in the face of an antagonistic British crown, it reads more like an exclamation point. Sock it to me, King George.

In his JFK book, Charles Hamilton fretted about the loss of that magic—and worse. Long before the introduction of ChatGPT, he warned darkly of “the transfer of man’s functions to the oiled gears of a machine,” imagining a White House in which an auto­pen could create a fabrication “so perfect that it would pass as authentic in any court of law.” Such a robot could “sign a document which might plunge the nation into war. Such a robot would sign mandates if the President were indisposed or absent or if he died and the news of his death were withheld. Such a robot could be a terrifying weapon in the hands of unauthorized persons.”

Some Republicans are making a similar case against Biden. Among them is Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation offshoot. Biden has said that the idea that he wasn’t responsible for making clemency decisions near the end of his term was “ridiculous and false.” But Howell believes that the former President’s autopen use reflects a commander in chief with diminished faculties callously handing power to his staff. His group plans to put Biden’s entire presidency under the microscope.

“Look, I’m not expecting the President to hand-sign Christmas cards, letters to the Boy Scouts, things like that,” says Kyle Brosnan, the Oversight Project’s vice president for legal. However, Howell says, an autopen “should not be used for things that only the President can do.”

It’s easy to dismiss efforts to probe Biden’s autopen as bad-faith weapons of partisan warfare—especially when Trump, an admitted user of the machine, continues to deride his predecessor as “the auto­pen President” and has gone so far as to decorate a White House “Presidential Walk of Fame” featuring portraits of every former commander-in-chief with an image of a robot signing Biden’s name. But there are others who believe presidential autopen use should be curbed in some cases, regardless of which party controls the White House. In the spring, Georgia Republican representative Buddy Carter introduced a single-line bill, the Signature Integrity for Granting National Pardons Act, that simply states, “The President shall personally sign any pardon or reprieve.”

Lawyer and former congressional aide Marci Harris shares that view. Currently the executive director of Popvox, a nonprofit that seeks to modernize Congress, she has championed the use of the digital-­signature platform Quill, the better to end the longstanding practice of interns spending hours running around Capitol Hill collecting signatures on the “Dear Colleague” letters that members send one another. Technology and delegation, she says, make Washington go round—but pardons should be held to a higher signature standard. “I have a whole lot of sympathy for the view that if you are going to exercise the extreme power of the office of the President of the United States to levy the one power in the Constitution not subject to checks by any other branch, then I don’t care how tired your hand gets,” Harris says. (She adds that alternative arrangements can be made for physically limited commanders in chief.)

What if a President is abroad, like Obama with the Patriot Act extension? Clinton and Reagan had major bills flown to Turkey and China, respectively, to sign them by hand. Inventor Matthew Gibson has a different solution: the LongPen, which uses an iPad or other touchscreen to control a pen from afar. He helped come up with the device after his mother, The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, wondered if there was a way to hold book signings in places she couldn’t travel to. The LongPen already has Ontario’s Cabinet Office as a customer, and Gibson says there has been limited pickup among African governments. By contrast, official Washington has yet to show much interest. “I think it’s because there really hasn’t been one of those ‘holy crap’ moments where there really is a big problem,” Gibson says.

He has a point. Despite Republican efforts to make hay out of Biden, there’s never been an autopen Watergate, a crisis large enough to create change. During the Iraq War, veterans and lawmakers criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for using the machine to sign letters sent to family members of troops killed in action. He promised to stop, and that was that. Day after day, year after year, in offices all over the city, robot arms scribble away without incident. Perhaps DC’s supposed autopen problem isn’t much of a problem in the first place. “There has to be some degree of delegation to staff members in a congressional office or an executive office,” says Kris Miler, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “The job is too big.”

Members of Congress, Harris says, set up their offices to match their management styles, which range from “absolutely nothing leaves this office unless I have my eyeballs on it” to “I defer everything to my chief of staff, who’s known me since law school.” Other leaders are similar. In theory, an ambitious underling could go rogue, using an autopen to sign off on something their boss would never approve otherwise—but in practice, that’s inviting big trouble. “If that’s not the actual wishes or preferences of the member,” says Miler, “you’re going to get fired.”

For all the hush-hush surrounding auto­pen use in Washington, the real secret is no secret at all: Like Jefferson, the city can’t live without it. The machine is simply too useful. Back in his office, Ed Bomsey flips through his collection of robot-written signatures. The names go on and on. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. General George C. Marshall. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As a collector, Bomsey is pained by all of this. But as a former lawyer who spent time in DC’s policy trenches, he’s sympathetic. “It’s the burden of the office,” he says. “You’re doing the best you can.”

This article appears in the November 2025 issue of Washingtonian. Due to an editing error in that version of the article, autograph verifier Steve Zarelli was incorrectly identified as Charles Zarelli. In a second reference, philographer Charles Hamilton was misidentified as Steve Hamilton.