President Donald Trump unveiled plans Sunday to halt production of the penny — but getting that initiative underway requires a few additional steps and possibly congressional approval.
Additionally, while Trump said he instructed the Treasury Department to stop minting them due to their high costs, supporters of the penny claim it’s wiser to evaluate changes to the nickel instead.
“For far too long, the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
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In fact, producing pennies is even more expensive than Trump’s numbers. According to a 2024 U.S. Mint report, it costs nearly 3.69 cents to mint a single penny. The coins are primarily made of zinc and then covered in copper.
Trump’s statement comes after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted on X in January how expensive minting pennies is.
DOGE is tasked with identifying ways to eliminate waste, and has so prompted changes, including gutting the $40 billion U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides aid to impoverished countries and development assistance.
Still, proponents of the penny exist. Americans for Common Cents, an organization that provides Congress and the White House with research on the value of the penny, claimed that efforts are better targeted at reducing the cost of the production for the nickel.
Nickels, worth five cents, cost approximately 13.8 cents to mint, according to the 2024 U.S. Mint report.
“The logical and fiscally responsible solution is not to eliminate the penny but to focus on producing a cheaper nickel,” Americans for Common Cents Executive Director Mark Weller said in a Jan. 23 statement. “This approach would address the real driver of losses while preserving the functionality of small denominations in everyday transactions.”
While the waters are a little murky on the next steps, experts say Congress likely would need to become involved and pass legislation to fulfill Trump’s wishes. And, historically, previous attempts in Congress to eliminate the coin have failed.
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“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,” Robert Triest, an economics professor at Northeastern University, told the Northeastern Global News.
Even so, there is bipartisan interest on Capitol Hill to modify minting pennies. In 2023, Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Maggie Hasson, D-N.H., reintroduced legislation to alter the composition of the penny to cut down on costs.
“It’s absolute non-cents that American taxpayers spend ten cents to make just one nickel. Only Washington could lose money making money,” Ernst said in a statement in April 2023. “This commonsense, bipartisan effort will modify the composition of certain coins to reduce costs while allowing for a seamless transition into circulation. A penny saved is a penny not borrowed.”
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Even so, a composition change will unlikely yield cheaper results. The 2024 Mint Report said that options for different metal compositions aren’t available to reduce production costs down to face value.
There’s still some precedent for change though, and Congress has acted previously to discontinue minting new coins. The legislative branch authorized discontinuing new half-cent coins in 1857.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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