The Fulcrum introduces Congress Bill Spotlight, a report by Jesse Rifkin, focusing on the noteworthy legislation of the thousands introduced in Congress. Rifkin has written about Congress for years, and now he's dissecting the most interesting bills you need to know about but that often don't get the right news coverage.
Trump recently discontinued production of the one-cent coin. What about the five-cent coin too?
What the bill does
A new bill in Congress would suspend production of both the penny and nickel for 10 years. The bill also contains a provision clarifying that all existing pennies and nickels ever produced would continue to remain as legally usable money.
It was introduced on February 12 by Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ1). The bill does not appear to have an official title.
Context
In fiscal year 2024, each penny cost 3.7 cents to produce, more than triple its face value. So on February 9, President Donald Trump announced that he was suspending the production of the penny for an indefinite period of time. (Again, existing pennies can still be used.)
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let's rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a penny at a time.”
Even some congressional Democrats supported the move. Rep. Schweikert introduced his bill three days later.
However, some worry that suspending only the penny may inadvertently increase government losses on coin production, by deepening reliance on nickels. Nickels cost 13.8 cents each, so the government actually loses far more on each nickel than on each penny: about 8.8 cents versus 2.7 cents.
What supporters say
Supporters argue in part by citing history. The U.S. last discontinued a coin’s production due to low value with the half-penny or “haypenny” in 1857. However, adjusted for inflation, it was worth more than 17 cents today – the financial equivalent of discontinuing the penny, nickel, and dime due to low values.
Supporters now argue that we should discontinue the penny and nickel but keep producing the dime and quarter because those two actually earn money. Each dime currently costs 5.8 cents, while each quarter costs 14.7 cents – both well below their face value.
Treasury Secretary William E. Simon even advocated suspending the penny back in 1976.
Noting “the diminishing utility of the one-cent denomination in commerce,” Simon wrote, “the United States government is rapidly approaching a decision point concerning continuance of the one-cent coin.” He argued for doing so in the 1970s or 1980s: “Elimination of the cent at some later date would be a much more drastic action than elimination now.”
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the bill is self-serving.
Rep. Schweikert represents Arizona, which produces about 70% of U.S. copper. Only the penny’s razor-thin outer coating is made of copper, but the actual coin is 97.5% zinc versus only 2.5% copper. Vice versa, despite literally being named a “nickel,” the five-cent coin is only 25% nickel versus 75% copper.
In other words, switching from pennies to nickels would require considerably more copper production – primarily benefiting Arizona. Little surprise that Arizona politicians have historically ranked among the biggest proponents of ending the penny in years past.
In 2006, then-Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ8) introduced the COIN (Currency Overhaul for an Industrious Nation) Act. In 2017, then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the similarly-named COINS (Currency Optimization, Innovation, and National Savings) Act. Neither received a vote.
Odds of passage
The new bill has not yet attracted any cosponsors, not even any Republicans. While lead sponsor Rep. Schweikert is a Republican, the bill isn’t particularly partisan in substance.
It awaits a potential vote in the House Financial Services Committee, controlled by Republicans. No Senate companion version appears to have been introduced yet.
Back in 2011, Rep. Schweikert also introduced a bill to replace the production of dollar bills with dollar coins within four years. (Currently, dollars are produced as both bills and coins.) The legislation never received a vote.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with the Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on the Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.