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The penny has been around for almost as long as the United States itself. It survived the Civil War, the Great Depression and decades of politicians complaining that it wasn't worth the trouble. But as the football spiraled through the air during Sunday's Super Bowl, President Donald Trump decided the country was finally going penniless.
"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents," Trump posted on Truth Social, mid-game. "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 [sic] budget, even if it's a penny at a time."
Trump may want to immediately sack America's least valuable coin, but the reality of phasing it out will be more complex, economists told The Washington Post.
Pennies won't disappear overnight. An estimated 240 billion pennies are out there, jammed in car seats, piled in gas station trays or rattling inside the old pasta sauce jars of people who still believe they'll take them to the bank someday. Unlike paper money, coins don't get recalled and shredded - they just keep circulating until they wear out. And with an average lifespan of 25 years, they'll still be jingling in pockets long after Trump leaves office, even if his order holds.
Trump's announcement doesn't call for pulling pennies out of circulation - just shutting down production. Under the Coinage Act of 1965, pennies would remain legal tender, and changing that would require an act of Congress.
But if the treasury secretary, following the president's orders, simply stops requesting new pennies from the U.S. Mint, production could grind to a halt without running afoul of the law, said Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard. U.S. Code states that the treasury secretary is empowered to change the penny's composition to "to ensure an adequate supply of one-cent coins to meet the needs of the United States."
That "can be met without any new copper pennies at all being minted - i.e. that the need is zero," Tribe said. "Unlike a lot of what the White House has been doing pursuant to the flood of executive orders since Jan. 20, this action seems to me entirely lawful and fully constitutional."
• A long time coming
It's unclear whether the country will ultimately move to withdraw pennies from circulation. But Congress has been trying to kill the penny for decades - and has failed each time.
Former representative Jim Kolbe (R-Arizona) took the first swing in 1990, proposing to round cash transactions to the nearest nickel. He tried again in 2001 and 2006. Nothing stuck. The late senator John McCain (R-Arizona) gave it a shot in 2017. Each attempt fizzled out - sunk by habit nostalgia and industries that still rely on America's most ignored coin.
Spokespeople for the White House didn't respond to a request for comment on Trump's plans to phase out pennies.
Robert Triest, an economics professor at Northeastern University, expects the United States to follow the lead of Canada - where pennies quietly disappeared after 2013.
"The year after Canada stopped minting new pennies, they were actually withdrawn from circulation," Triest said. "It's hard to say if that will happen here or not. In the meantime, we would function as we did before, just with fewer new pennies being introduced."
Triest is envisioning a "slow death" for the Abraham Lincoln-faced coin.
The penny has been clinging to life since 1792, when the first pure copper one-cent pieces started circulating. In 1909, it got a facelift, replacing the Indian-head cent with Lincoln's profile - making it the first American coin to feature a real person. Over the years, it shrank, shed its bronze for cheaper metals, and became the most produced but least valued coin in the country.
Every year, the mints in Denver and Philadelphia press sheets of metal into billions of copper-plated tokens. Conveyor belts spit them into boxy bags before they're hauled into armored trucks bound for the Federal Reserve. From there, the coins trickle into banks, then registers, then pockets - kicking off yet another round of the penny's shuffle through the economy.
But this process, as Trump noted Sunday, comes at a cost. In its annual report last year, the U.S. Mint said it churned out nearly 3.2 billion pennies in fiscal 2024, losing $85.3 million in the process - the 19th straight year that production costs have outpaced their actual worth. Since the Mint sells pennies to the Federal Reserve at face value but spends more than double that to make them, the Treasury racks up an annual penny deficit - a condition known as "negative seigniorage."
This, combined with the fact that pennies have not kept up with inflation, makes a strong case for eliminating the coin, said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University.
"Even if you could make a penny out of thin air, out of no resources, it wastes our time when we use it. There's the problem," Whaples said. "So if you add that on top of the fact that the penny costs more than 3 cents to mint and distribute, that's harming the taxpayers."
• A nation without pennies
The effects of Trump slamming the brakes on penny production won't be felt immediately, Triest and Whaples both said. But over time, businesses such as convenience stores and gas stations will start running low, increasing the demand for pennies. A similar scenario played out during the pandemic, when a coin shortage led to signs asking customers to pay with exact change or hand over spare pennies.
"They might put up signs like they did during covid, 'Please bring your pennies in,'" Whaples said. "And if people didn't, then they would start to adopt the policy of rounding to the nearest nickel."
According to Triest, rounding off would be "a wash for consumers, because the chance of it being rounded down is about the same that's been rounded up." Whaples, who in 2007 analyzed nearly 200,000 transactions from a multistate convenience store chain, found no evidence of a "rounding tax" - or of stores being more likely to round up their prices.
"You're as likely to pay $2.01 and round down to $2 as $1.99 and round up to $2, given the purchase of multiple items and taxes," Whaples said. "The rounding breaks even, and the consumer is not going to be gouged when we get rid of the penny."
However, Raymond Lombra, professor emeritus of economics at Pennsylvania State University, isn't convinced that businesses won't try to profit from the penny's demise by increasing prices. Back in 1990, he told Congress that eliminating them would amount to a $600 million annual "rounding tax" on consumers - one that disproportionately hits the poor.
And that still holds true, he said. In 2023, cash made up just 16 percent of transactions nationwide, but for households earning under $25,000, it was 32 percent - double the average, according to the Federal Reserve. For those making $100,000 or more, it dropped to 11 percent. Older Americans also rely more on cash, Lombra said, meaning they'd feel the pinch, too.
"So this rounding tax is going to hit folks at the lower end of the income distribution," Lombra said. "And I get why billionaires - and I'm not mentioning names - don't pay any attention to this, because how many transactions are they doing in cash?"
Lombra, however, insists he's not some die-hard penny loyalist - and he sees the case for getting rid of it. But what frustrates him isn't the decision itself, it's the lack of analysis behind it.
"In the grand scheme of things, the penny isn't a big issue," Lombra said. "But I think the penny is symptomatic of a larger trend we're seeing around, which troubles me, of having these bold claims that 'If we do this, we'll get this really good result,' which are often devoid of real scrutiny. It's like some politicians are assuming that the benefits are big and the costs are small, so they just go for it."
And if you think you could make a killing by saving your pennies and waiting for them to become a collector's item, Triest has bad news for you.
"I wouldn't count on them being a very valuable collector's item, because there's so many of them out there," the Northeastern professor said. "It's unlikely they'll be rare enough to be worth much more than a penny at any point in the foreseeable future."
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