Next time you Venmo a pal for that dinner from the other night, consider tossing a few bucks to the federal government. The U.S. government operates a website that lets anyone donate toward paying down the national debt, apparently, and now it takes Venmo.
Jack Corbett from NPR’s Planet Money first spotted the change, which added the app into the mix as a payment option. If you’ve lost your Venmo password, never fear, you can still help reduce the public debt with a bank account, debit/credit card, or even a PayPal account.
It’s not immediately clear who decided to add a payments app mostly used for settling rounds of drinks to the U.S. Treasury website, but Trump administration officials do have a preference for Venmo, which is infamous for making users’ transactions and friends lists public. Mike Waltz, former national security adviser, not known for his OPSEC (that’s “operational security” for the uninitiated) was spotted with a public Venmo contact list prior to being ousted from the administration.
It’s difficult to imagine any American actually tossing money at the federal government beyond what they pay in taxes, but those rare souls do exist—and they’ve been giving the U.S. government cash for decades, sometimes doling out more than $1 million at once.
The U.S. currently operates $36.7 trillion in debt, which unfortunately renders the almost $70 million donated since 1996 totally insignificant. If you’ve got expendable income, almost anything seems like a better option.
It’s been a particularly rough month. Not only did Trump’s “big beautiful bill” slash hundreds of billions from Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, but it will also tack another $3.4 trillion onto the national debt over the next 10 years.
