Newsweek, January 2025
President Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is on a mission to abolish the penny. A day after the new administration was sworn into office, DOGE, which is being led by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, criticized the cost of minting pennies, pointing out that the one cent coins cost over three cents to make and that doing so cost taxpayers over $179 million in the fiscal 2023 alone. The group, which is not an official government agency, also noted that the U.S. Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in 2023—around 40 percent of the 11.4 billions of coins produced that year.
“Penny (or 3 cents!) for your thoughts,” the DOGE account on X posted Tuesday. It’s true. The production of pennies has put the country in a bizarre paradox where the U.S. Mint produces new pennies every year to replace the ones given as change but never spent, creating a perpetual-motion-machine of coins that no one seems to use.
