Donald Trump halts minting of new pennies, calls coins ‘wasteful’

Washington: US President Donald Trump directed the Treasury Department to stop minting new pennies as the cost of producing the coins is “so wasteful”.

In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump said, “For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”

The Trump 2.0 administration has sternly been maintaining its focus on cost cutting, targeting entire agencies and dismissing scores of federal workforce.

“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump wrote.

Musk’s DOGE found irregularities in Treasury Dept
While en route to the championship game, the President told reporters that Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (DOGE) found irregularities while examining data at the Treasury Department, intimating that many even lead the US to disregard some payments.

“There could be a problem, you’ve been reading about that, with Treasuries,” he said. However, it wasn’t immediately clear whether he was talking about the US government debt, or payments processed through the department, a Bloomberg report said.

“That could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don’t count,” he said, adding that, “Therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought of.”

Notably, Musk’s DOGE recently sought access to the payments data of the Treasury department. However, the billionaire’s remarks on social media have largely been about transactions made to contractors and grant recipients, not bondholders.