Elon Musk's DOGE team spent months getting mocked for hunting pocket change instead of real government waste.
On Monday, the full House proved DOGE right about one wasteful expense that had been hiding in plain sight for over two centuries.
Every single member of Congress just admitted Washington has been setting money on fire one coin at a time.
House Kills The Penny In A Vote Nobody Saw Coming
The House passed the Common Cents Act on Monday by unanimous vote.
The bill permanently ends production of the one-cent coin.
It forces cash transactions to round to the nearest five cents.
Existing pennies stay legal tender, so nobody's jar of change on the kitchen counter suddenly becomes worthless.
Electronic payments, credit cards, and checks are untouched. This is strictly about cash.
Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain wrote the bill and steered it through the House.
"Washington has a spending problem, and it shows up in places big and small," McClain said.
That's not a soundbite. That's an X-ray of the entire federal government.
Trump Called It Wasteful First And Washington Finally Listened
Trump ordered the Treasury to stop minting pennies back in February 2025.
He posted on Truth Social that the coin "literally cost us more than 2 cents," calling the whole operation an embarrassment for a government that claims to be broke.
Democrats and their media allies rolled their eyes at the time.
Eighteen months later, the entire House just voted his way – every last one of them.
The U.S. Mint lost more than $85 million making pennies nobody wanted in fiscal year 2024 alone.
Every single penny cost taxpayers 3.69 cents to produce.
That's not a rounding error. That's bureaucratic malpractice, repeated more than three billion times a year.
Decades Of Washington Dysfunction Finally Got Overruled
Congress has tried and failed to kill the penny since 1990.
Barack Obama called it "a good metaphor" for government waste back in 2013 and did nothing about it anyway.
Senators John McCain and Mike Enzi tried and failed to kill it in 2017.
Every attempt died the same way – buried by a Congress too gridlocked to agree the sky is blue.
Trump didn't wait for Congress to find the courage. He ordered the Treasury to act and let the politicians catch up.
That's the difference between a president who moves and a government that talks.
The Nickel Is Next And Washington Knows It
Buried in the same bill is permission for the Mint to redesign the nickel with cheaper materials.
That's because the nickel is an even bigger money pit than the penny ever was.
Every nickel currently costs the government nearly 14 cents to produce.
Washington has been losing money on two different coins in your pocket at the same time, for years, and calling it normal.
Nobody in the old Congress wanted to touch that number either, because admitting it meant admitting the failure was structural, not accidental.
This Was Never Really About The Penny
This vote is a referendum on how broken the old Washington playbook was for 35 straight years.
Every previous president talked about the penny the way Democrats talk about the border – plenty of concern, zero action.
For decades this was a bipartisan punchline, not a bipartisan bill.
Then Trump treated a two-cent coin like every other piece of government waste, the kind nobody in Washington wanted to touch because touching it meant admitting the bureaucracy fails at basic math.
Robert Garcia, one of Trump's loudest Democrat critics in the House, still ended up co-sponsoring this bill because the math was too obvious to fight.
That's what happens when waste becomes impossible to defend. Even your enemies sign on.
Look at how long this took, and ask yourself what else is sitting in that same drawer right now, protected by the same excuse Washington always uses.
The penny didn't get killed because Washington discovered arithmetic. It got killed because one president finally refused to accept "that's just how it's always been done" as an answer.
That's the actual story here, and it's bigger than a coin.
Sources:
- Elizabeth Elkind, "House unanimously votes to eliminate 1-cent coin permanently," Fox News, September 14, 2026.
- Lisa McClain, "House Passes Chairwoman McClain's Common Cents Act to End Wasteful Penny Production," House Republican Conference, 2026.
- Donald Trump, Truth Social post, February 9, 2025.
- Cato Institute, "The Penny Should Be Jettisoned," Cato at Liberty, 2025.
