It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.
No idea what you're talking about here. This isn't a left-vs-right issue, and journalism gave the concerns approximately the attention they merited.
> It's indicative of the current US administration that they managed to screw this up despite many examples world wide of how to do it properly.
No, it's indicative of problems uniquely caused by existing American governance and law. When we did it, we didn't have an issue analogous to the one with SNAP payments described throughout the thread, because our welfare programs don't work that way and our legal code isn't designed to enable the same kind of future pedantry. Besides which, the Biden and Obama administrations (and others before them) didn't even attempt this as far as I'm aware, despite that the US penny being costly for quite some time. (As far as I can tell, the current cost is mostly not due to the cost of the base metal, which is almost all zinc since 1982. Checking commodity prices and doing some back of the envelope math, switching back to copper would cost them an additional two cents per penny.)