The Presidential Dollar: a coin the country refused to spend

In 2005, Congress looked at a hit and tried to bottle it twice.

The hit was the 50 State Quarters program. A new design every few weeks had turned spare change into something people checked, sorted, and collected — and it minted real demand for an ordinary coin. Lawmakers wanted that magic again, but with a harder problem to solve: the dollar coin. America had tried to replace the paper dollar twice — first with the 1979 Susan B. Anthony dollar, then the 2000 Sacagawea "golden dollar" — and both times the public shrugged. The coins piled up; the bill stayed in wallets.

So the Presidential $1 Coin Act, signed by President George W. Bush on December 22, 2005, bet that changing portraits would pull the dollar coin into daily use. The plan: honor every deceased president, four per year, in the order they served — the same rolling-design trick that worked for the quarters. The first coin, George Washington, was released on February 15, 2007, near his birthday.

It did not work. People still didn't want a dollar coin, no matter whose face was on it. But the Mint kept striking them by the hundreds of millions because the law required four new presidents every year. By mid-2011, more than 1.25 billion unspent dollars had accumulated in Federal Reserve vaults — an NPR Planet Money investigation put the waste in the hundreds of millions of dollars, since each coin cost roughly 30 cents to make. On December 13, 2011, the Treasury pulled the plug: it stopped making Presidential dollars for circulation and finished the series — through Ronald Reagan in 2016 — for collectors only.

That is the strange charm of this coin. It is one of the most-produced and least-used coins in U.S. history at the same time. You can find a 2007 Washington in pocket-change quality for a dollar — yet it is also a genuine artifact of a government program that failed in public and kept running by law.

Every Presidential dollar pairs a fresh face with one unchanging scene.

The obverse — the heads side — carries the president's portrait, the name, the term in office, and which number president he was. A new design appeared every quarter, so the early years rotated through a string of Mint sculptor-engravers. The 2007 portraits of Washington and Jefferson, for example, were designed and sculpted by Joseph F. Menna, who would later become the Mint's chief engraver. Across the full run the obverse designers vary president by president — the credit lines change with the face.

The reverse — the tails side — never changes, and it is the work of one man: Don Everhart, a U.S. Mint sculptor-engraver. He gave the series a dramatic, low-angle Statue of Liberty — an "ant's-eye view," as it has been described — that looks up the length of the figure rather than at it straight on. That single image carried the whole program from 2007 to 2020, with only "$1" and "United States of America" sharing the field.

The real novelty was on the edge. When it launched in 2007, the Presidential dollar was the first regular-issue U.S. coin in more than two centuries to carry edge lettering — the inscription rolled onto the rim rather than the face. The edge held the year, the mint mark, thirteen stars, and "E PLURIBUS UNUM," and at first "IN GOD WE TRUST" too. The coin's golden color came from a manganese-brass outer layer over a pure-copper core — the same trick used on the Sacagawea dollar to make a dollar coin look and feel different from a quarter.

For a coin made by the billion, the Presidential dollar has a surprising amount to chase.

The famous error: the "Godless dollars." Among the first Washington dollars released in February 2007 were coins that skipped the edge-lettering machine entirely — leaving them with no edge inscriptions at all, including "IN GOD WE TRUST." Commentators nicknamed them "Godless dollars," and the story made national news the same day the coin debuted. Estimates of how many escaped run to the tens of thousands certified by grading services (one collector guide puts the total released as high as roughly 250,000); a large batch surfaced around Jacksonville, Florida. These are the signature collectible of the series — and a clean illustration of why edge lettering, struck in a separate step, created brand-new ways for a coin to go wrong.

Other edge varieties. Because the lettering was a second operation, the early issues produced doubled edge lettering and inverted ("upside-down") edge lettering. Be careful here: an inverted edge inscription is not an error — roughly half of all Presidential dollars were struck that way by the nature of the process. The genuine errors are the missing and doubled ones.

Key dates by scarcity. The arc of the series is the story in miniature. The 2007–2008 issues exist in staggering numbers — the 2007-P Washington alone tops 176 million. After circulation production stopped in 2011, mintages collapsed: the 2013-D Taft and Wilson dollars are reported at just 3.36 million each, the lowest in the series. The collector-only later dates were never released into circulation, so a worn example simply doesn't exist — they come only from Mint sets.

Why high grades can still be scarce. A coin made by the hundred-million is common; a flawless one is not. These dollars were bagged, shipped, and counted by machine, and the soft golden alloy nicks and scuffs easily, so top-grade survivors (MS67 and up) of the high-mintage early issues are genuinely thin on the ground. Collectors also pursue the Satin Finish coins from the 2007–2010 Uncirculated Mint Sets, which often grade very high, and the Reverse Proof versions that appeared in special Coin & Chronicles sets beginning in 2015.