On February 9th, US President Trump announced that he has asked the Treasury Department to stop producing one-cent coins, stating that the production of these coins is a waste. Trump posted on his “Truth Social” social media account, “For a long time, it has cost more than 2 cents to mint each one-cent coin in the United States. This is too wasteful! I have instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to stop the production of new one-cent coins.”
“Let’s eliminate waste from our great nation’s budget, even if it’s just a single cent,” he added.
The one-cent coin was first issued by the government in 1793. According to the annual report of the US Mint, the cost of producing one-cent coins in the 2024 fiscal year was close to 3.7 cents, and for 19 consecutive fiscal years, the cost of producing one-cent coins has been higher than one cent.
Before 1962, one-cent coins were made of copper, but now they are mainly made of zinc with a copper coating. The US Treasury Department states that Lincoln has been imprinted on the one-cent coin since 1909, and it was the first coin minted by the US Mint.
Billionaire Elon Musk, commissioned by Trump to oversee the Department of Government Efficiency, aimed at reducing government waste, criticized the one-cent coin in a post on the X platform last month. “The cost of manufacturing one one-cent coin is over 3 cents. In the 2023 fiscal year, American taxpayers spent over $179 million on this,” wrote DOGE. “The mint produced over 4.5 billion one-cent coins in the fiscal year, accounting for about 40% of the 11.4 billion circulating coins,” Musk wrote.
The debate over whether to eliminate the one-cent coin from the US currency system has been ongoing for years. In 2013, economist Henry Aaron suggested in a commentary for the Brookings Institution, “We should eliminate the one-cent coin, and while we’re at it, eliminate the five-cent coin.”
“Life would be simpler without these odd denominations,” he wrote.
Supporters argue that the one-cent coin helps lower price points for consumers and serves as a source of income for charities.
In recent years, federal officials have proposed suspending the issuance of one-cent coins, with former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew advocating for this idea in 2015. The Richmond Federal Reserve Bank stated in a blog post in 2020 that some economists also support discontinuing the circulation of the one-cent coin, but eliminating it could lead to significantly negative consequences as transactions would be rounded up to five cents.
“For individual items or small purchases, rounding up could mean a significant change in price,” the blog post at the time pointed out.
“On the other hand, using the one-cent coin also incurs additional, hard-to-quantify costs, which supports the idea of canceling the one-cent coin. Counting out one cent for change takes time, as the old business adage goes, time is money,” the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank noted.
For many Americans, the one-cent coin has become a nuisance, often ending up discarded in drawers, ashtrays, and piggy banks.