Stopped clock at midnight
By 
The penny is being ended:
The U.S. ended production of the penny Wednesday, abandoning the 1-cent coins that were embedded in American culture for more than 230 years but became nearly worthless.
When it was introduced in 1793, a penny could buy a biscuit, a candle or a piece of candy. Now most of them are cast aside to sit in jars or junk drawers, and each one costs nearly 4 cents to make.
“God bless America, and we’re going to save the taxpayers $56 million,” Treasurer Brandon Beach said at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia before hitting a button to strike the final penny. The coins were then carefully placed on a tray for journalists to see. The last few pennies were to be auctioned off.
I’m not sure how Trump stumbled into this, but it is unambiguously the correct policy, as Caity Weaver explained in her classic story on the subject [gift link]:
Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.
A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”
It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.
The United States government has willfully ignored this nonsensical math problem for decades. Forty-eight years ago, in letters to Congress, William E. Simon, then the Treasury secretary, begged lawmakers to “give serious consideration” to abandoning 1-cent coins as soon as possible. The frantic tempo at which pennies were plummeting out of circulation, a Treasury report warned, would soon plunge the Mint into “a never-ending spiral” of “ever-increasing production” as it flailed to replace unused pennies with more pennies that would likewise remain unused — a bit like deploying a bucket to combat a dripping ceiling leak, and it turns out the leak is the ocean because the room was built under the sea, and the only way out of this anyone can think of is to engineer increasingly large buckets. The coin should be eradicated, the report reasoned, “no later than 1980.”
The only question is why this wasn’t done a lot sooner.