So if you took about 1 .4 billion $1 coins, and
you just laid them out flat edge to edge. That
is a lot of coins. Right, it would literally
stretch all the way from Los Angeles to Chicago.
Yeah, a massive solid highway of metal. And right
now, that exact highway. is sitting in absolute
darkness, just locked away in federal reserve
vaults. Just gathering dust. Exactly. And it's
sitting there because the United States government
spent over a billion dollars manufacturing a
currency that the American public, well, they
just flat out refused to touch it. They really
did. So today for this deep dive, we are looking
at a huge stack of data about this ambitious
government initiative. It was designed to completely
change how we spend our money. and it ultimately
resulted in a literal mountain of unwanted coins.
So, okay, let's unpack this. I'm ready. Because
this isn't just some boring story about minting
money. I mean, it is a fascinating study of behavioral
economics, political compromises, and honestly,
some truly bizarre manufacturing errors. It really
is. And my mental backdrop for this deep dive
is just a cavernous, overflowing bank vault.
Right. Scrooge McDuck style. Exactly. Because
I firmly believe knowledge is most valuable when
we understand the why behind historical oddities
like this. Like, how does an advanced economy
accidentally toward over a billion dollars in
spare change? It's a great question. And to find
the answer, the origin story of this whole stockpile
really takes us back to December 2005. That is
when Congress passes an act authorizing a brand
new presidential dollar coin program. OK, so
2005. Right. But to understand why they did this
in the first place, we have to look at the Treasury's
financial playbook at that exact moment. They
were coming off the heels of the 50 state quarters
program. Oh, yeah. Everybody remembers those.
Yeah, and it was an absolute blockbuster for
them. It was huge. And since you've been following
these, you know, behavioral economics trends
for a while, you know, the state quarters program
wasn't just a fun little collectathon for kids.
Oh, no, not at all. It was a massive revenue
generator. The government noticed that millions
of Americans were pulling these quarters out
of circulation, just hoarding them in those little
cardboard map folders of the maps. I have one
of those same. And because of that. The Treasury
was raking in just an absurd amount of seniorage.
Yes. And what's fascinating here is how aggressively
they tried to scale that economic engine. Right.
They wanted to go bigger. Exactly. The Treasury
looked at the $6 .3 billion with a billion dollars
in seniors they generated between 1999 and 2008
from those state quarters. $6 .3 billion. Just
from quarters. Just from quarters. And they essentially
got greedy. I mean, seniorage is basically the
profit the government makes from the difference
between a coin's face value and its actual production
cost. So if it costs five cents to make a quarter,
they make 20 cents profit. Precisely. And they
realized that if the public hoards the coins
instead of spending them, it effectively gives
the government billions in free capital because
nobody is cashing them in. Wow. So it's just
free money for the Treasury. Right. So the logic
was incredibly straightforward. They thought,
if we can generate that much profit on a 25 cent
piece, imagine the senior loop we can create
with a higher denomination. Oh, of course. Let's
put the presidents on a one dollar coin and just
watch the revenue multiply. Which on paper sounds
like a great idea. And the rollout plan was highly
structured. I mean, they decided to release four
presidents a year. in chronological order of
their terms in office. Starting with Washington.
Right, Washington first. But they attached this
specific historical safeguard to the legislation.
It was called the Dead for Two Years Rule. Yes.
Basically, a president had to be deceased for
at least two years prior to the minting date
to even be eligible to get a coin, which honestly
is a very standard, very necessary safeguard.
It's meant to prevent the politicization of living
figures on active currency. You don't want a
current president putting their face on money.
Exactly. You don't want a sitting politician
using the US Mint as a taxpayer funded campaign
billboard. But, you know, as we will see, that
seemingly logical rule created a massive legislative
headache down the line. Oh, it completely backfired.
But even before they got to those headaches,
like before they even minted the first George
Washington coin, the entire initiative ran into
a bizarre political roadblock, a very specific
roadblock. Right. Because at the time, the government
was already producing the Sacagawe dollar coin
and. It was struggling, like really struggling.
Nobody was using it. The public just wasn't interested.
And the whole point of the new presidential coin
was to replace the Sacagawea one. But the North
Dakota congressional delegation stepped in. North
Dakota. Because they considered Sacagawea a local
hero and they fiercely protected that coin. So
they forced a legal mandate stating that the
Mint had to continue producing the failing Sacagawea
dollars right alongside the brand new presidential
ones. The absurdity of that mandate, it really
cannot be overstated. Makes no sense. None. You
have Congress legally authorizing a brand new
currency, specifically because the old one is
failing, while simultaneously legally mandating
the continued mass production of the failing
currency. It's wild. The initial legislation
literally forced the Mint to produce one Sakagoea
coin for every three presidential coins, a ratio
that they later reduced to one in five, but still.
OK, I mean, think about it like a movie studio.
Oh, I like this. Right, so a studio has a massive
flop. but then they try to launch a brand new
cinematic universe to recover. A fresh start.
Exactly. Except the studio executives, in this
case, the North Dakota delegation, they mandate
that the incredibly unpopular lead actor from
the flock has to be awkwardly written into every
third scene of the new franchise. That is exactly
what it was like. It just bloats the entire production.
It completely confuses the audience. And the
Federal Reserve, I mean, they saw this train
wreck coming from a mile away. They had to. They
officially warned Congress. They pointed out
that if the public didn't adopt the new dollar
coins, forcing the continued production of the
Sakuei dollars was just going to bleed taxpayer
money with literally zero economic benefit. Just
burning money. But political leverage won out.
And the mandate stood. So, okay, the convoluted
rules are all set. Yeah. And the Mint actually
has to physically engineer these things now.
And they purposely matched the electromagnetic
signature of the new coin to the old Kubernetes
Susan B. Anthony dollar from the 70s. Which is
actually incredibly shrewd. Right. Because they
knew if they forced the private sector to update
all the coin acceptors in millions of vending
machines and transit kiosks, it would have been
a disaster. The rollout would stall out on day
one. People would be furious. That was the genius
of the physical composition, though, because
they used a manganese brass cladding, specifically
77 % copper, 12 % zinc, 7 % manganese and 4 %
nickel over a pure copper core. That's a very
specific recipe. It is. And it gave the coin
this distinctive golden color, which distinguished
it visually from a standard quarter, while completely
bypassing any corporate friction by keeping the
internal electromagnetic signature identical
to the older coins. So the vending machines thought
it was a Susan B. Anthony. Exactly. So they nailed
the internal mechanics. Yeah. But they completely
overcompensated on the aesthetics, like the reverse
side featured the Statue of Liberty. And they
actually omitted the word liberty entirely, which
is Pretty bold for U .S. currency. Yeah. They
were banking on the idea that the statue itself
was universally recognizable enough to convey
the message. But the real gimmick, like the thing
that caused massive, massive headaches, was the
edge of the coin. The edge lettering. Instead
of stamping all the historical information on
the front or back faces, they stamp the year
of minting. The mint mark. 13 stars and the mottoes
e pluribus unum in God we trust directly onto
the rim of the coin. And here's where it gets
really interesting, because if the entire goal
of this multi -billion dollar program was seamless
public adoption and rapid massive production.
Which it was. Right. We're talking four presidents
a year, hundreds of millions of coins. Why would
the Mint introduce a highly complex, historically
error -prone manufacturing step like edge lettering?
It is a phenomenal contradiction in manufacturing
logic, truly. It just seems so unnecessarily
complicated. It was. To understand why it's a
terrible idea for mass production, you have to
look at how modern coins are actually struck.
Usually, a blank piece of metal goes into a press,
right? And a retaining collar holds it in place
while the top and bottom dies strike it. OK,
that makes sense. That collar is what gives a
quarter its ridged edge. It all happens in one
forceful, instantaneous strike. Boom, you have
a coin. Just one step. Exactly. But to put letters
on the edge, you can't do that. The coin has
to be ejected from the main press, move completely
across the factory. floor and fed into a separate
machine. Wait, really? A totally different machine?
Yes, a Shuler edge lettering machine. And that
machine rolls the coin under immense pressure
to imprint the text on the edge. So you're taking
a streamlined single strike process. and intentionally
breaking it into two separate logistical steps.
You're introducing a massive mechanical bottleneck.
Precisely. And the United States had not issued
a circulating coin with edge lettering since
the 1933 Saint -Gaudens Double Eagle. That is
a long time ago. It's decades. Historically,
edge lettering dates all the way back to the
1790s, and its original purpose was strictly
anti -theft. Really? Anti -theft. Yeah, people
used to shave the edges off solid gold and silver
coins to illegally hoard the precious metals.
So early mints started stamping the edges with
text to make any tampering immediately obvious.
Oh, that's clever. But wait, these new presidential
coins are made of brass and copper. Exactly.
Nobody in 2007 is shaving the edges off a brass
coin to melt down a fraction of a penny's worth
of base metal. That's absurd. Which means the
decision to use edge lettering was purely an
aesthetic vanity project. They just wanted the
coin to look clean and sophisticated. But introducing
that secondary machine process was basically
begging for mechanical failure at that scale
of production anyway. Oh, and the failure was
immediate. Yeah. So in February 2007, the very
first coin drops, George Washington, and almost
immediately an estimated 50 ,000 of these coins
managed to escape the mint. without ever going
through that Shuler edge lettering machine. Just
completely skipped it. Bypassed it entirely.
And because In God We Trust was supposed to be
on the edge, The media had quickly dubbed these
the godless dollars. The godless dollars. And
the secondary collector market went into an absolute
frenzy over these. Oh, they lost their minds.
The very first godless dollar discovered and
verified was sold on eBay for $600. $600 for
a $1 coin. It created a gold rush mentality among
corn rule hunters. Everybody was looking for
them. Which highlights just an incredible irony
here. The mint implements this highly complex
edge lettering to make the coin look sophisticated,
right? utilizing a technique originally invented
to stop thieves from shaving the edges off coins.
And instead, the collector hype gets so intense
that people in 2007 start taking regular Washington
dollars. and literally filing the edges off themselves.
Yes. Just to create fake, godless errors to scam
people on the internet. It is so funny. And the
mechanical errors just kept compounding with
every new release because the coins are fed into
the edge lettering machine loosely, right? The
physical mechanics of the hopper mean there is
no way to control which side is facing up. It's
random. Completely random. As a result, when
the John Adams coin came out, some coins got
stuck and went through the machine twice. So
they got printed twice? Yes, resulting in double
text. Sometimes the text was overlapped, sometimes
the coin flipped over in the hopper, and the
text was inverted. Meaning the motto would read
in two different directions on the same rim.
Exactly. It was chaos. I love the stories of
people finding coins with the edge text upside
down. Like, upside down relative to the president's
face on the front. And they were trying to sell
them online as highly coveted rare errors. Oh,
the upside down lettering. That one is so funny
because that is purely a basic law of probability.
It is not a minting defect at all. Not an error.
No. Since the coins fall into the edge lettering
machine randomly, there is literally a 50 % chance
the text will be upside down relative to the
obverse. It's just a coin flip. Literally. Exactly.
Yet people were convinced they had struck gold.
But the most extreme mechanical failure was actually
discovered by a couple in Colorado. Oh, the blank
ones. Yes. They found a totally blank piece of
metal. No president's face, no Statue of Liberty.
It had somehow bypassed the primary striking
press entirely and only received the edge lettering.
That is amazing. But here is the ultimate irony
of all this. The Mint was panicking over these
edge lettering errors, right? They're trying
to fix the assembly line chaos, completely blind
to the fact that they were missing the forests
for the trees. Because none of it actually mattered.
Right. The general public didn't care about the
text on the edge because they were refusing to
even pick the coins up in the first place. That's
what triggered the real nightmare. The public
aggressively rejected the coins for everyday
transactions. Behavioral economics tells us that
changing a society's deeply ingrained habits
requires either an undeniable incentive or sheer
force. You can't just ask them nicely. Exactly.
The coins were heavier than paper. They felt
clunky in a pocket. And Americans just have a
long -standing cultural preference for the one
dollar paper bill. So what does this all mean?
Like picture yourself as the Treasury Secretary
in 2011. Yeah. You are funding a manufacturing
operation that is churning out millions of coins
a month that local banks literally do not want.
They were sending them back. Because their customers
refuse to take them as change. So by 2011, a
stockpile of 1 .4 billion uncirculated dollar
coins had piled up in Federal Reserve vaults.
Unbelievable. If you laid those coins flat, that
is our Los Angeles to Chicago highway of wasted
metal. Just sitting there. You probably have
a jar of loose change somewhere in your house,
but imagine being a taxpayer, funding a vault,
holding a billion dollars that you literally
cannot give away. It's staggering. And this raises
an important question about government mandates
versus consumer behavior. Because other countries
have done this right like Canada. Yes, Canada
with the loony or the European Union with the
one and two euro coins They have successfully
transitioned their populations to high denomination
coins, but they did it differently, right? They
achieved that by forcefully removing the equivalent
paper note from circulation. You had no choice
The United States Government Accountability Office,
the GAO, they actually released a detailed report
stating that replacing the one dollar bill with
a one dollar coin would save the government about
five point five billion dollars over 30 years.
Five point five billion. Just because the physical
lifespan of a metal coin is decades. Whereas
a cotton and linen paper dollar bill wears out
in a few years. Right. It constantly has to be
shredded and reprinted. Exactly. The macroeconomic
math was entirely. solid. But the US government
lacked the political will to actually stop printing
the paper dollar bill. They didn't want the backlash.
No, so they gave the public a choice. And when
given the choice between adapting to a pocketful
of heavy brass coins or sticking with the familiar
lightweight paper bill, Consumers will always
choose the path of least resistance. Every single
time. That lack of political follow through is
how a potential $5 .5 billion in long -term savings
mutated into a massive logistical burden of storing
unused metal. And it got to the point where the
Federal Reserve was literally running out of
reinforced floor space to hold the physical weight
of these coins. The floors were buckling. So
finally, in December 2011, Vice President Joe
Biden and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had
to officially step in. They suspended the minting
of presidential coins for general circulation,
which effectively pulled the plug on the grand
experiment. They recognized that continuing mass
production was just throwing taxpayer money into
a dark room. The program didn't die entirely,
though. Starting with Chester A. Arthur, the
mint pivoted. They continued to produce the series,
but in vastly reduced quantities, selling them
at a premium solely directly to collectors, straight
through to the Ronald Reagan coin in 2016. Which
brings us back to that dead for two years rule
we discussed at the start. Ah, yes. When the
chronological release schedule hit 2016, Jimmy
Carter, Bill Clinton, the two George Bushes,
and then current President Barack Obama were
all skipped over. because they were still alive.
Which creates a glaring chronological gap in
the numismatic collection. And because the original
legislation strictly defined the parameters of
the program, adding those skipped presidents
later requires Congress to draft and pass entirely
new standalone legislation. It is such a hassle.
It is, which they did in 2020 to authorize a
coin for George H .W. Bush after his passing.
And just recently, in February 2025, a new bill
was introduced to extend the program following
the death of Jimmy Carter. OK, so you have the
main coin program piling up in vaults, creating
this monumental logistical and political nightmare.
But while all of that was happening in the background,
there was a parallel ultra premium version of
the program quietly running right alongside it.
The gold coins. Yes, it was like this golden
spouse's side quest, bringing its own set of
bizarre historical workarounds. The first spouse
program. The congressional legislation stipulated
that the United States would honor the spouses
of each president with a half -ounce $10 gold
coin. released on the exact same chronological
schedule as the presidential dollars. And to
be clear, these were not intended to be pocket
change. Definitely not. These were heavily premium
investment items. Depending on the volatility
of the global gold market at the time of release,
they were priced anywhere from roughly $430 to
over $1200 each. Extremely expensive. And because
of that high price point, the mintages were incredibly
low, with some specific releases dropping under
2000 units produced. But if we connect this to
the bigger picture, the first spouse program
really highlights the incredibly rigid, uncompromising
nature of congressional legislation. How so?
Well, the law explicitly dictated that a spouse
coin must be issued alongside every single president.
But history is messy. It doesn't fit neatly into
a legislative spreadsheet. What happens if a
president was unmarried during his term? or was
a widower. Right, because Thomas Jefferson, Andrew
Jackson, Martin Van Buren, James B. Cannon, none
of them had a first spouse during their time
in office. Exactly. So the Mint was forced to
create these generic, symbolic liberty designs
emblematic of their respective eras, just to
fulfill the legal quota mandated by Congress.
They had to put something on the coin. But the
ultimate trivia fact... Like the one detail that
perfectly encapsulates the blind bureaucracy
of this entire multi -year initiative involves
our 21st president, Chester A. Arthur. This is
a remarkable historical workaround. It's so weird.
Chester A. Arthur's wife, Ellen, died before
he ever took office. He served his entire term
as a widower. The law demanded a companion coin
for his release, but there was no First Lady
to feature. Right. So rather than simply skipping
the release, the legislation explicitly directed
the mint to feature Alice Paul on his companion
coin. And Alice Paul was a famous highly influential
suffragist. Yes, she was. But she was never married
to Chester A. Arthur. She was never a First Lady.
Her only connection to him whatsoever was the
historical coincidence that she happened to be
born during his presidential term. That was the
only link. It is exactly like a failed video
game releasing a $500 VIP collector's edition
and then forcing you to download bizarre logically
disconnected content just because the developers
needed to fill a specific line of code. They
just needed to fill a spreadsheet cell to comply
with the letter of the law. It's hilarious. It
is the ultimate victory of bureaucratic compliance
over common sense. And just like the massive
circulation program, this premium gold line couldn't
escape the manufacturing chaos either. Oh, of
course not. Even at the highest premium levels
with drastically reduced production numbers,
errors slipped through. In 2007, the Mint accidentally
struck in Abigail Adams of verse the front of
the coin with the Louisa Adams reverse. Oh, wow.
Yeah, they created a highly sought after mule
error coin, proving that the logistical strain
of this program impacted literally every single
tier of production. So we started with a multi
-billion dollar ambition. completely inspired
by the massive senior success of the state quarters.
The treasury genuinely thought they had found
the golden ticket to generate endless revenue
by forcing a new denomination into the public's
hands. They were so sure it would work. And instead,
they engineered a coin that required an edge
lettering process that had been functionally
obsolete for circulation coins since the 1930s.
A terrible idea. And that decision resulted in
the infamous godless errors. the overlap text
and the upside down edge lettering that sent
the secondary collector market into an absolute
frenzy. A frenzy which didn't matter at all to
the general public who hated the heavy clunky
coins so much they outright refused to use them.
And that consumer rejection forced the government
to stockpile 1 .4 billion of them in reinforced
vaults stretching that equivalent distance of
Los Angeles to Chicago. All while quietly selling
thousand dollar gold coins featuring suffragists
pretending to be presidential spouses just to
satisfy a rigid legal loophole. It's quite the
legacy. It serves as a profound lesson in the
limits of top -down design. You can engineer
a coin to perfectly match the internal electromagnetic
signature of an old Susan B. Anthony dollar to
appease the vending machine industry. You can
pass federal laws mandating its production. Yes.
But you cannot legislate consumer behavior. The
American public's simple, stubborn preference
for the familiar paper dollar bill entirely dismantled
a multi -billion dollar government strategy.
And that leaves us with one final, fascinating
detail from our sources today. Because by the
end of the year 2022, that massive vault busting
stockpile of unused dollar coins had slowly,
painstakingly dwindled down to 888 million coins.
Still a mountain. Still a mountain. And the Federal
Reserve estimates that Based on current minimal
usage rates, this remaining inventory will finally
run out around the year 2038. Which is a projection
heavily reliant on the assumption that the slow
trickle of demand we see today remains constant
for the next decade. Right, so think about that
timeline for a second. As we move closer and
closer every single day to a completely cashless
digital society, like a world where you pay for
your morning coffee by tapping your phone or
your smartwatch against a screen. It's where
we're heading. Will those 888 million physical
metal coins sitting in the dark ever actually
be used by the time 2038 rolls around? It's hard
to imagine. Or will they simply remain locked
away in that cavernous vault forever? eventually
becoming an obsolete ironic monument to an early
21st century attempt to forcefully change how
we spend our money. It definitely makes you wonder
what else is quietly sitting in the dark just
waiting to be forgotten.