There's a lot of pennies, and this article about pennies is fabulous. You'll enjoy reading it -- if I don't spoil it all below... (archive link at bottom)

The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation—which, if true, means that the Milky Way galaxy contains about three times more American pennies than stars. How, you ask, could the plan for 300,000,000,000 coins be “nothing”? The Mint, you say, issued a formal press release about striking the final cents. Surely, you insist, that implies some sort of strategy, or at least is evidence of logical human thought and action?

I contracted this condition last year, as I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture.

This summarizes our government pretty accurately:

The simplest way to say this is that everyone directly involved in making billions of pennies every year knew that it was pointless to do so, and also thought that it was legally impossible to stop. Specifically, they thought they were bound to make pennies until Congress issued a law ordering them to cease (which, everyone agreed, was unlikely to ever happen). This, I discovered months into my research, did not appear to be true.

I'm speechless: "we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint."

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).

Effectively, they are trash—trash that Americans pay the government (via taxes) to manufacture, at a loss, and then foist back on us; millions of pounds of trash for which we, every time we have ever accepted a penny coin at checkout, have tacitly agreed to provide free private stowage, in perpetuity.

Mint officials told federal auditors in 2019 that, if even a fraction of the nation’s never-spent pennies were simultaneously spent or cashed in, the deluge of change would be “logistically unmanageable” for the federal government. For one thing, there would likely not be enough space to store them in our nation’s bank vaults.

it’s unclear if anyone would bother recycling U.S. pennies, which, although copper-plated, are made mostly of zinc. Recycled zinc is worth only about a quarter of recycled copper; nearly 1 million tons of copper are recycled in the U.S. each year, versus only about 165,000 tons of zinc. On top of this, a Canadian Mint official told me, copper and zinc are “very hard” to separate.

The worst-case scenario would seem to be that we have only just a few days ago stopped manufacturing billions and billions and billions of hazardously produced zinc disks with no practical use that are also unsellable as scrap.

Is Caity Weaver responsible for killing the penny?

I published my theory—that Title 31, Section 5111 of the Code of Laws of the United States of America empowers the secretary of the Treasury to order that no pennies be minted—last September. On a U.S. Mint webpage that appears to have been created earlier this week (simultaneously with the announcement that the final penny coins intended for circulation had been struck in Philadelphia), this long-overlooked section of the U.S. Code is cited as the legal justification for halting penny production.

jokes on them, they don't realize all their money is trash.