DOGE takes aim at the penny

• In a post on X, DOGE criticized how much it costs to produce the penny.
• The debate over the penny, which costs more to make than it's worth, is decades old.
• DOGE alone can't take the coin out of circulation.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is targeting one of the federal government's most notorious examples of waste: the penny.

Getting rid of the penny would test whether DOGE can eliminate a piece of government inefficiency that has survived decades of reform attempts.

On Tuesday, DOGE's account on X highlighted the coin's mounting costs: In fiscal year 2023, taxpayers spent more than $179 million producing over 4.5 billion pennies, with each coin costing more than three cents to make.

Despite bipartisan recognition of the penny's costs since at least the 1970s, efforts to phase out or reform the coin have repeatedly stalled in Congress, making it an ideal target for DOGE's efficiency campaign.

Lawmakers were considering the questions as recently as November, when Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who founded the Senate's DOGE caucus, said changing the makeup of the coin could save significant money.

Material costs are largely to blame for the penny's high cost. While the coins were originally pure copper, they've been nearly 98% zinc since 1982 per JM Bullion. But zinc isn't as cheap as it once was. According to the US Mint's 2023 report, the penny's unit cost increased by 12.9%, the most of any other coin.

Fewer people are using cash at all in recent years, according to the Federal Reserve's 2024 report on consumer payments. While the report doesn't break down penny usage, it found that 16% of payments in 2023 were made in cash, down from 18% the year before.

It's not clear from one post if DOGE plans to officially take on eliminating the penny — and Musk's group alone doesn't have the power to get rid of the coin. Congress would need to pass a law stopping the distribution of the coin or, in theory, the Treasury secretary could decide that the nation didn't need to make any more.

Other countries, including Canada and Sweden, have stopped producing their pennies, and the US ditched its half-cent coin in 1857. Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, found in a 2022 survey that 58% of respondents think the government should stop producing new pennies.

When President Donald Trump came into office on Monday, he signed an Executive Order that situated DOGE as an agency inside the government and limited its scope to updating the federal government's IT systems. By posting about the penny, DOGE seems to be signaling it plans to give its two cents on far more than software issues.