President Donald Trump says he has directed the Treasury Department to stop minting new pennies, citing the rising cost of producing the one-cent coin.
“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 his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
The move by Trump is the latest in what has been a rapid-fire effort by his new administration to enact sweeping change through executive order and proclamation on issues ranging from immigration, to gender and diversity, to the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
Trump had not discussed his desire to eliminate the penny during his campaign. But Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency raised the prospect in a post on X last month highlighting the penny’s cost.
The U.S. Mint reported losing $85.3 million in the 2024 fiscal year that ended in September on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies it produced. Every penny cost nearly $0.037 — up from $0.031 the year before.
The mint also loses money on the nickel, with each of the $0.05 coins costing nearly $0.14 to make.
It is unclear whether Trump has the power to unilaterally eliminate the lowly one-cent coin. Currency specifications — including the size and metal content of coins — are dictated by Congress.
But Robert K. Triest, an economics professor at Northeastern University, has argued that there might be wiggle room.
“The process of discontinuing the penny in the U.S. is a little unclear. 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,” he said last month.
I have defended the existence of the penny in the past, more because I like coins than for any coherent practical or ideological reason. Especially post-pandemic, coin usage is way down, and so the removal of the penny from daily life would be felt far less than it once would have been. In terms of the reckless lawbreaking and unconscionable damage that Trump and Musk are doing to the country, this is way, way down on the list of concerns. In terms of cutting costs and saving money, this is barely even a rounding error, one that only sounds substantive to someone who doesn’t understand the difference between “million”, “billion”, and “trillion”. If and when we do kill off the penny (and maybe the nickel and who knows what other coins), I’d like to see us do it with a bit more ceremony – there’s a lot of interesting history here, we should give it its due. But I’m not going to expend any energy on that now.