Bipartisan legislation to finally end the production of pennies was introduced in the Senate on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Abolishing the penny has been often discussed yet never acted upon until recently when Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, presented a bill that would end production.
“It’s the opposite of ‘common cents’ for taxpayers’ dollars to fund wasteful spending like producing pennies,” Merkley said in a statement.
The bill states that those pennies still in circulation could still be used in transactions and considered legal tender, and anticipates the move would alleviate nearly the $100 million spent on penny minting annually. In 2024, the U.S. government lost more than $85 million on the 3.2 billion pennies it produced.
In February, President Donald Trump announced his preference for getting rid of pennies as a means of financial transaction saying they’ve become outdated and wildly inefficient to produce.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
In 2024, it cost 3.7 cents to make one penny, which is nearly twice what it cost in 2021 when it was 2.1 cents. In the age of credit cards and payment apps, cash transactions are becoming less common, with coins piling up in couch cushions and dryers. Americans discard nearly $68 million in coins every year while 60% of actively circulating coins, or nearly $14 billion, remain idol in coin jars, according to the Federal Reserve.
On Wednesday, another bipartisan anti-penny bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that goes further the the Merkley and Lee bill mandating that all cash transactions be rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and Rep. Robert Garcia, R-Calif., co-sponsored the Common Cents Act that would mandate the U.S. mint to cease producing pennies.
“We need to find every opportunity for savings that we can. So this was kind of an easy one, and it’s gotten bipartisan support. So I think that’s a positive thing. We just have to find savings wherever we can find savings,” McClain said.
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