President Donald Trump issued a directive to the U.S. Treasury Department. He instructed treasury officials to stop minting new pennies.
The U.S. Mint reported losing $85.3 million in the 2024 fiscal year. The mint produced nearly 3.2 billion pennies from October 2023 through September 2024. Every penny cost nearly $0.037—more than three and a half cents. That’s up from $0.031 the year before.
The mint also loses money on the nickel. Each of the $0.05 coins costs nearly $0.14 to make.
President Trump did not express a desire to stop making the penny during his campaign. But the new Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk’s appointed leadership highlighted the penny’s cost. Musk raised the prospect of dropping the penny in a social media post last month.
The President defends his anti-cents announcement. “For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than two cents,” he wrote in a post Sunday night. “This is so wasteful!”
The move by the President is the latest of his new administration’s sweeping—and rapid—changes. The changes address issues ranging from immigration to place names.
It is unclear whether President Trump has the power to nix the lowly penny. After all, Congress dictates currency—including coin size and metal content.
Economics professor Robert K. Triest argues that there might be wiggle room for the President’s edict.
“The process of discontinuing the penny in the U.S. is a little unclear,” he says. “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.”
Members of Congress have repeatedly introduced laws taking aim at the zinc coin with copper plating. Proposals over the years have attempted to temporarily suspend making the penny or drop it from circulation.
Most economists say dropping the penny won’t have much impact on consumers—even if businesses will begin rounding up to the nearest nickel for cash sales.
Robert Whaples has called for the removal of the penny since at least 2007. At that time, he published a paper in the Eastern Economic Journal. It read in part: “Eliminating the penny will have [little] impact on inflation and on convenience store costs and profits.” He continued, “But it will save time for customers and clerks, which may be worth about $730 million per year.”
Whaples is still on board with ditching the penny. Two weeks ago, he told CNN, “It takes time to use a penny. At the average wage of an American, we earn about one cent every two seconds. So if it uses a couple extra seconds . . . it’s a loss to society.”
Other proponents of dropping the coin cite savings for the mint, speedier checkouts at cash registers, and the fact that a number of countries have already eliminated their one-cent coins. Canada, for instance, stopped minting its penny in 2012.
It wouldn’t be the first time the United States eliminated its least valuable coin. Congress dropped the half-cent coin in 1857. Minted since 1793, the half-cent was slightly larger than the penny or nickel and almost as large as the quarter.
President Trump’s new administration has been intensely focused on cost cutting. The President recently wrote, “Let’s rip the waste out of our great [nation’s] budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”
