There are already some signals about which government expenses could be on the chopping block for Elon Musk's DOGE.

A penny-pinching tactic proposed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency could be getting rid of the penny itself.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a new target to cut down costs: the US penny. DOGE said on X that the penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

Elon Musk had sharp words for a private-sector partnership touted this week by the Trump administration to hasten the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk said of two of the participants in the $500 billion initiative, OpenAI and SoftBank, on his social media site X.

One Trump ally told Politico that “It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president” in his attack on Altman—which pretty quickly devolved from “they don’t have the money” to presenting Altman as a spineless flip-flopper who trashed Trump during his first term but is sucking up to him now.