More than a billion of the coins -- half of all the dollar coins in existence -- are sitting unused in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank, Speier says. The reason for their storage is because nobody wants to use or collect them.
Speier said it costs the government an estimated $300 million to create and store the coins, and the Reserve is going to continue to mint them until 2016.
Speier's bill would only allow more coins to be minted if reserve levels fall below 10 percent.
