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President Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that he has instructed the U.S. Treasury to stop producing new pennies, citing the cost of making the coin.
Trump shared the details in a post to his Truth Social account, explaining the “wasteful” expenditure.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” he wrote.
Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk noted the concern related to the one-cent coin last month.
“The penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023,” DOGE wrote on X. “The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced.”
The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Mint lost $85.3 million in the last fiscal year on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies it produced. “The mint also loses money on the nickel, with each of the $0.05 coins costing nearly $0.14 to make,” it added.
While Trump can instruct the Treasury to stop creating new pennies, the coin will unlikely go out of use anytime soon. An act of Congress would need to be enacted, something that has been introduced in the past but has never been successful.
The idea of ending the production of one-cent coins is not limited to the U.S. Other nations, including neighboring Canada, have ended production of one-cent currency. Canada stopped producing pennies in 2012.
The move is one of several already taken by the Trump administration to cut costs. The administration also ordered the cancellation of General Services Administration (GSA) media subscriptions on Thursday after shocking findings by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOG) concerning millions of taxpayer dollars received by mainstream media outlets.
The order came shortly after DOGE reported that Politico received $8.1 million in one year from government subscription services.
“Pull all contracts for Politico, BBC, E&E (Politico sub) and Bloomberg,” the email read, according to Axios. “Pull all media contracts for just GSA – cancel every single media contract today for GSA only.”
