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CV NEWS FEED // President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he had ordered his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to halt the minting of new U.S. pennies, calling the production of the copper-colored coins costly and “wasteful.”
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump stated 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 nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”
Last month, Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote in a post to X (formerly Twitter) that the penny “costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023.”
“The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced,” continued the new government organization run by billionaire Elon Musk. “Penny (or 3 cents!) for your thoughts.”
The Daily Wire reported that the “cost of producing all coins increased across the board in the last fiscal year, according to the 2024 annual report from the U.S. Mint.”
Conservative political commentator Harrison Krank wrote on X: “I don’t think we should be celebrating the end of the penny, we should be outraged that our government has inflated our currency to the point where the lower denominations are worth less than the metal they are stamped on.”
According to The Daily Wire, if the president “were to move to get rid of the penny entirely, he would likely need Congressional approval.”
