The Treasury Department has made what it expects to be its last order for metal blanks that it will turn into pennies.
The department expects that it will stop putting new pennies into circulation early next year, according to Reuters.
However, there will be no shortage of pennies stashed wherever Americans store the coins. There are about 114 billion pennies in circulation, the Treasury Department said.
As noted by CBS, the penny is made of zinc with a copper overlay.
Republican and Democratic members of Congress have introduced legislation to end the production of the penny, according to Reuters.
In February, President Donald Trump said it was time to stop wasting money just to produce something no one wants.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! “ Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“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.”
Forbes noted that Trump was being conservative in his post.
Should the Treasury discontinue the penny?
The U.S. Mint said last year that it costs 3.69 cents to make each penny.
In its annual report, the mint said the cost “remained above face value for the 19th consecutive fiscal year.”
Making pennies led to a loss of $85.3 million for the U.S. Mint in the 2024 federal fiscal year.
The coin represented 54 percent of the 5.87 billion coins the Mint made that year.
The New York Post noted that in 2022, 58 percent of Americans polled were willing to ditch the penny.
The penny will be the 12th piece of U.S. currency sent to the scrap heap, according to ABC.
The half-cent coin, the 2-cent coin, the 20-cent piece and the “trime” – a three-cent piece that lasted from 1851 to 1873 all were shunted aside, Caroline Turco, assistant curator of the Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said.
“We retired them for multiple different reasons, but normally because they were not being used or they just became too expensive to produce,” she said.
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