Before Donald Trump, change came to Washington very slowly. Now it has come in a great, big, destructive whirl. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) deputy and fellow billionaire Elon Musk is leading the charge in shuttering and rearranging government agencies, but much of the change is coming straight from Trump’s pen in executive orders and other directives to the cabinet to turn things in Washington upside down.

Musk considers himself more than an agent of destruction, though. He sees creation and destruction as going hand-in-hand — hence the term “creative destruction.” So far, it’s hard to discern the creative in all that destruction, but there is one coppery glint of creation that may be a sign of good things to come.

As I said, it is small — the change I am talking about is Trump’s decision to ax the penny. It’s a debate that has been going on for my whole writing career. In 1996, when I was fresh out of college and in my first job, the Government Accountability Office — DOGE before DOGE — was a glint in Trump’s eye. The GAO gave testimony to Congress that it might be time to get rid of the penny. Sixty percent of the billions of cents we were making never saw the inside of someone’s pocket.

Today, the case is even better. It takes eight of today’s pennies to equal the buying power of one penny when I was born. As a result of that inflation, the cost of the metal in a penny costs nearly four cents — we lose money on each of the billions we produce. And we don’t use them. The majority of the pennies we produce yearly are never circulated.

It’s not as if we don’t know what to do when they’re finally gone. Years ago, Congress held hearings and wrote competing bills on how companies should manage to round prices and taxes when the smallest coin we have is a nickel. Come to think of it, a nickel today is worth less than a 1971 penny and it, too, costs more to make than it is worth.

You may have noticed that over the 30 years we’ve been debating the fate of the penny, Republicans have had periods when they were in charge of all three branches of government, and so have the Democrats. We’ve had conservative presidents and liberal presidents and more moderate presidents. Federal agencies have written dozens of rules that manage how we pull the metals in a penny out of the ground.

And it’s not as if the issue of the penny is such small change that it isn’t worth the time of Congress and the president. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars making money losing pennies and nickels every year. It affects the lives of everyone in the country, from toddlers who learn to hoard pennies to buy candy to every consumer who buys something with cash and has to dig for them in their pocket or find a place to stash all the meaningless change they get back.

The fact that it took Trump to do something so gobsmackingly obvious for so long should make us all step back and consider whether Washington might benefit from the whirlwind of chaos the second term of the Trump administration has brought. There are too many problems in this country that have been kicked down the road with the hope that some future administration will deal with them rather than suffer some pain today by dealing with them now.

At the top of that list is Social Security, which is bankrupt because Congresses controlled by both parties have spent the decades of surpluses that were supposed to be saved. The day when we have to reckon with that disaster is coming soon.

Or consider the Pentagon taken over by Pete Hegseth — who, if you believe his detractors, is a drunken, womanizing incompetent. That may or may not be, but it wasn’t Hegseth who screwed up Defense Department spending so badly over the last 30 years that the agency has never passed an audit.

Or consider the billions in extra unemployment benefits shoveled out the door during COVID-19. We overpaid about $60 billion, including roughly $6 billion in outright fraud. This was while the much-hyped civil service was untouched by DOGE and Trump’s other destructive minions.

Yes, Trump is messing up Washington. He has no plan for what to put in the place of what he is destroying. He is putting unqualified leaders in office, some of whom are bent on undermining the very agencies they are being put in charge of.

But there are reasons we elected Trump. One of them is that Washington didn’t work for the public when all the competent and responsible people were in charge. Whether we like it or not, Washington needs some creative destruction.

Kansas City Star columnist David Mastio has worked for newspaper opinion sections since starting as letters editor of USA Today in 1995.