Trump’s Plan To End The Penny Pays Off: Us Treasury Winds Down Minting Of The 1-cent Piece

It looks like the American penny’s days are numbered, bringing to fruition President Donald Trump’s stated plan to scrap the U.S. one-cent piece.

According to ABC 7, the Treasury Department has released a statement that the U.S. Mint, which operates under the department’s oversight, will no longer produce pennies once it runs out of blank templates used to produce the coins. The last order of penny blanks was put through earlier in May.

“Additional savings will accrue as facility usage is adjusted and other efficiencies are achieved with the reduced production,” the Treasury Department indicated.

This move follows Trump’s announcement of a call to nix the penny via a Feb. 9 Truth Social post, wherein he noted the perceived wastefulness of continually minting the one-cent coin.

“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,” Trump wrote at the time.

Per Politico, the cost of minting a penny increased by 20% in the 2024 fiscal year, reaching 3.69 cents to produce a single one-cent coin. The nickel could be next in the president’s sights, as it currently costs about 14 cents to mint each example.

“Given the cost savings to the taxpayer, this is just another example of our administration cutting waste for the American taxpayer and making the government more efficient for the American people,” the Treasury Department further stated.

Retailers and Businesses Encouraged To Round Down Prices, Treasury Secretary Says

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told lawmakers that the removal of the penny from production could eventually require retailers and other businesses to make price adjustments to the nearest nickel.

“We are also encouraging rounding down,” Bessent said, providing testimony to a House appropriations subcommittee.

Bessent also suggested that he was investigating the possibility of changing the material used — currently a cupronickel alloy of 75% copper and 25% zinc — to manufacture the American nickel, with the aim of reducing its production cost by about two-thirds, bringing it under the coin’s face value.

The US Penny Technically Isn’t One, Some Say

As an interesting note: One expert was cited by ABC 7 as underscoring the fact that the U.S. penny isn’t a penny at all, but should be more formally referred to as a cent.

Caroline Turco — assistant curator of the Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado — signaled that the penny has never actually existed in the United States.

“The American system does not have a ‘penny.’ That is a misnomer,” Turco said.

“We have a cent because when we rebelled against the British they had pennies and that is a British word,” she added.