The government has been trying for a decade to persuade Americans to use $1 coins — trying and failing.

Back when the first attempt was made, the vending machine and metal industries, which would benefit from the coins, lobbied Congress to withdraw the paper dollar from circulation and force a change, but Congress balked.

Now in a time of fiscal stress and just when the U.S. Mint is pushing its new presidential dollar coins, advocates of the coin are back with a new pitch: It would help cut the deficit.

The Government Accountability Office estimates that the government could save more than $500 million a year by using the dollar coin exclusively, since it's more durable than the dollar bill and offers the Mint a big profit on every one it makes.

"Taxpayers love to say nobody in Washington is doing anything to cut wasteful spending. This they can do themselves," says Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a group more associated with fighting earmarked federal funding than promoting coins, which has signed on with the coalition nonetheless.

Known as the Coalition for the $1 Coin, the group's supporters include PMX Industries Inc., the Iowa-based affiliate of a Korean firm that manufacturers the copper blanks the Mint uses for the dollar coin; as well as the National Bulk Vendors Association and anti-tax groups like Americans for Tax Reform.

Congress in 2005 wrote a law ordering the Mint to design and mint dollar coins honoring the presidents, starting in 2007.

The Mint is issuing four coins each year, in chronological order; this year the coins honor Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln.

They've been slow to catch on with the public, though, just as was the dollar coin honoring Sacagawea, the American Indian guide who helped Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reach the Pacific in 1805. That is despite a $67 million marketing campaign that accompanied the Sacagawea coin's introduction a decade ago.

The Government Accountability Office concluded in 2002 that a $1 coin probably could not succeed unless the government pulled the $1 bill from circulation. That's probably impossible politically, but Schatz says the government could certainly do more to help the coin.

"There's no magic wand to get people using dollar coins," he says. "But some of it has to come from individuals."

Shawn Zeller writes for Congressional Quarterly. A version of this story first appeared in CQ Weekly.

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