Citing the expensive expense of creating one penny, President Donald Trump declared on Sunday that he has directed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to stop producing pennies.
The United States has been minting pennies that cost us more than two cents for far too long. What a waste! My Secretary of the US Treasury has been directed to cease making new pennies. Trump posted on social media after the Super Bowl, saying, “Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”
After Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wrote on X last month, drawing attention to the enormous cost of creating the single-cent coin, the campaign to abolish the penny, which has been under attack for years, gained momentum.
An article in the New York Times Magazine last year made the case for doing away with the coin. The article stated that “the need to abolish the penny has been evident to those in authority for so long that the failure to do so has turned the coin into a symbol of deeper rot.”
According to CNN, In 2023, the US Mint stated that approximately 4.1 billion pennies were in circulation. According to the US Mint’s annual report for fiscal year 2024, the cost of producing and distributing the US penny increased by more than 20% to approximately 3.7 cents. The cost of producing the coin is increasing, in part due to the growing price of metals like copper and zinc.
The Brooking Institution website published a post in 2013 that went one step further and called for the US to discontinue producing both the penny and the nickel.
The article made the case that proponents have been too timid rather than overly bold, suggesting that we should discontinue using the rightmost decimal point altogether and drop not only pennies but nickels as well.
