President Donald Trump said he has directed the Treasury Department to cease minting pennies. Why? Because they’re too expensive to make.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote in a post Sunday night on Truth Social. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called it “a great move,” and that aside from the fiscal advantages, it has environmental benefits, like reducing carbon emissions and energy used to produce them. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, the co-chair of the Forward Party, also chimed in, saying, “The penny hasn’t made sense for a while now.”
The Trump-Vance administration is laser focused on cutting spending, and it’s put billionaire Elon Musk in charge of the task.
The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Musk, in a post on X noted that in recent years, these 1-cent coins have cost the U.S. more than 3 cents to make, higher than their face value. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. government produced 4.5 billion pennies, which cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $179 million.
There’s bipartisan support behind getting rid of the penny. Other countries, like Canada, have already stopped production of the lowest denomination coins, as The Washington Post reported.
Democratic President Barack Obama also showed support for it back in 2012. “This is not going to be a huge savings for government, but anytime we’re spending more money on something that people don’t actually use, that’s an example of something we should probably change,” Obama said.
Philip N. Diehl, the former U.S. Mint director under former President Bill Clinton, in a 2015 column, wrote he also backed eliminating the penny while he served in the federal government but said such a move would receive pushback from the private sector.
“Most of the work of producing the nation’s one-cent coin has been outsourced to business. The mint only stamps and bags the coin,” he said. “These business interests have a lot to do with why the penny survives today, 25 years after its utility to commerce was over.”
As a New York Times Magazine piece from 2024 notes, people don’t spend pennies anymore. And this creates a cyclical problem where newly minted pennies enter the market to replace the unspent ones so that cash transactions can be properly settled.
“A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, ‘sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes,‘” writes The New York Times’ Caity Weaver. She further reports that should these “missing” pennies start reappearing, it might spark a host of logistical issues, like finding room in government vaults.
So, does Trump have the power to issue such an order? According to Robert K. Triest, professor of economics at Northeastern University, the process of cutting out pennies from the circulation isn’t clear cut.
“It would likely require an act of Congress, but the Secretary of the Treasury might be able to simply stop the minting of new pennies,” Triest said in an interview. He noted that the U.S. would have to create rules to guide cash transactions.
Plus, pennies don’t have the purchasing power that they used to have. That combined with the decreasing number of cash transactions, swiftly being replaced by digital wallets, reduces the impact of discontinuing such a coin.
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great (nation’s) budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump said in a post following the Super Bowl on Sunday.