“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “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 nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”

In 2016, minting a dollar’s worth of pennies cost the federal government $1.43. Just seven years later, the price to produce a single penny is more than three times the coin’s value, according to JM Bullion, an online retailer of metals. In 2023, the U.S. Mint lost $179 million in producing pennies that likely just ended up in car cupholders and fountains. 

Even former President Barack Obama said minting pennies reflects the government’s inability to prioritize what is most important and useful for our nation. 

“Anytime we’re spending more money on something that people don’t actually use, that’s an example of something we should probably change,” Obama said in 2013. “And one of the things that you see chronically in government is it’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work so that we can then invest in the things that do. The penny ends up being, I think, a good metaphor for some of the larger problems that we’ve got.”

Talks of discontinuing the penny have been ongoing since the late 1970s, when then-Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon wrote a letter to lawmakers requesting that they “give serious consideration” to ditch minting the penny. In the 1977 letter, Simon suggested that the coin should be discontinued “no later than 1980,” according to the New York Times. 

It is estimated that 240 billion pennies lie dormant in the U.S., equivalent to $7.24 worth of pennies for every person in the country. 

In 2000, Philip Diehl, then-director of the U.S. Mint, reported that between 1969 and 1999, two-thirds of the pennies produced dropped out of circulation. Pennies produced today will soon be lost, thus creating a never-ending cycle. 

However, if all these pennies stored away in piggy banks and jars were brought to the local CoinStar machines or banks, it could cause major problems since there would be a lack of space to store the coins in government vaults. Mint officials said the resurfacing of these out-of-circulation pennies would be “logistically unmanageable.” Moving the pennies would be extremely costly. For instance, $100 worth of pennies weighs over 55 pounds. 

If the U.S. ceased minting pennies, the overall savings would be negligible in the grand scheme of things. Minting pennies costs the federal government $179 million, and minting dimes, quarters, and half dollars generates more than $433 million in revenue. However, the money generated from minting coins still represents less than a fraction of 1% of the government’s $6.13 trillion budget. 

Opponents of discontinuing the penny say it would actually create a 1-cent tax on products and services, as most retailers list prices at 99 cents instead of rounding up. However, an analysis conducted by Robert Whaples, a Wake Forest economist, in 2007 revealed that, in the long run, it evens out how often prices are rounded up and rounded down.

“The last digit’s pretty random,” Whaples said.

While few people rely on pennies to make purchases, many people hold the 1-cent coin in high regard. 

A 2014 YouGov poll revealed that 71% of people would bend over to pick up pennies off the ground and that 43% said they would be “disappointed” or “angry” if the government discontinued making them. 

The penny also features President Abraham Lincoln, who has appeared on the penny since 1909. The Lincoln penny is also the coin that includes the phrase “In God We Trust.”

“You find out fast how much people care about coins the moment you start talking about removing [Lincoln],” Diehl told the New York Times. “All of a sudden, there are a lot of people who care about coins.”