Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The penny is seemingly immortal: Thousands of people have tried to kill it, but every time it has survived.
Why it matters: It now meets what might be its most formidable adversary yet, in the form of Elon Musk.
Driving the news: A post from the official DOGE account on X makes clear what everybody who has studied the subject already knows — that pennies are, quite literally, weighing down the American economy.
“Few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability to stop minting this worthless currency,” wrote Caity Weaver in a 7,500-word jeremiad for the NYT Magazine last September.
By the numbers: The 240 billion pennies lying around the U.S. collectively weigh about 600,000 tons — the weight of three Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
The overwhelming majority of them made their way after being minted to some retailer, where they were given out in change. After that, they just stopped being used, because almost no one actually spends pennies.
In fact, cash broadly is increasingly rare as a form of payment. Only about 16% of payments are made in cash, per the Federal Reserve banks, and cash is no longer the most popular form of payment even for purchases under $25.
Then there’s the cost — in fiscal 2024 the U.S. Mint reported each 1-cent penny cost 2.72 cents to produce, the 17th consecutive fiscal year the coin cost more to make than it was worth.
The big picture: The penny is such an anachronism that many of the original arguments for its abolition can now be applied to nickels and dimes, too.
The last time the U.S. discontinued a coin was in 1857, when the half-cent sensibly disappeared. That coin was worth almost twice as much as a contemporary dime.
For the record: A DOGE spokesperson, asked whether they intend to abolish the penny, responded with “Shouldn’t you ask Treasury?”
Treasury didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The bottom line: Dimes and smaller denominations serve no useful purpose. In a rational country, the nation’s pockets would be weighed down with them no longer.
DOGE’s road to saving $2 trillion starts with an unexpected order
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Whatever Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was supposed to be, on Monday it apparently took a new form altogether — a federal office with deep influence over the government’s digital infrastructure.
Why it matters: Once explicitly envisioned as an out-of-government vehicle to cut $2 trillion from the budget, slash federal jobs, reduce waste and streamline bureaucracy, DOGE is instead starting with an apparent pivot to Musk’s bread-and-butter: software development.
