DOGE counts the cost of making pennies

President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday said that the average U.S. penny costs three cents to manufacture. It based that value on articles from a website for coin collectors and an online seller of precious metals. During the 2023 fiscal year, penny manufacturing cost American taxpayers $179 million, DOGE wrote in a social media post. Of the 11.4 billion coins the government manufactured during that same fiscal year, roughly 4.5 billion of them were pennies.

How serious is DOGE about eliminating the penny? It remains unclear how much power DOGE’s temporary task force will have to effectuate its desired changes. The U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization has an 18-month mandate to make the government more efficient. In his order changing the name of the U.S. Digital Service to the U.S. DOGE Service, Trump ordered every federal government agency to designate a team of four people—one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney. Each agency’s team would work with a DOGE temporary task force focused on making the government more efficient.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about how one of DOGE’s proposed leaders recently said he will not end up working with the organization.