In recent years, the public Venmo accounts of government officials have brought on a string of awkward news stories for a congressman, a Supreme Court justice, and even the sitting U.S. President. But despite those cautionary tales, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance has become the latest politician to let his public contacts on the payment app pop up in headlines.
On Thursday, WIRED published a detailed analysis of Vance’s 211 public Venmo connections. Among them was Amalia Halikias, government relations director at the Heritage Foundation, which is the organization orchestrating the controversial Project 2025 plan to stack a new Republican administration with conservative loyalists.
Just because two people are connected on Venmo doesn’t mean they’ve exchanged payments, but the contact highlights Vance’s ties to the Heritage Foundation. The Ohio senator has given speeches at the organization and voiced support a policy similar to the one outlined in Project 2025 to restaff the federal government. Following Vance’s VP nomination, the head of the foundation, Kevin Roberts, told reporters that “privately, we were really rooting for him.”
Democrats have honed in their attacks on Project 2025, calling it proof of the radical policies that would be implemented in a second Trump term. For their part, the former president has begun distancing himself from it, and Vance clarified his support for the project shortly before his nomination, saying the plan had “some good ideas,” but also that “most importantly, it has no affiliation with the Trump campaign.”
Since joining the Senate, Vance has built his politics around populist rhetoric mirroring that of the former president, and he’s been a harsh critic of elite universities, proposing legislation to ban consideration of race in college admissions as well as cracking down on encampments on campus. In a post on social media in April, Vance said, “Elite universities have become expensive day care centers for coddled children,” adding that they “no longer serve a useful function.”
Elite universities have become expensive day care centers for coddled children.
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 30, 2024
It's time to tax university endowments aggressively. They no longer serve a useful social function, so they shouldn't get taxpayer subsidies.
But Vance’s contact list on Venmo paints a more intricate relationship with the establishment and elite institutions than he has recently indicated. The senator himself graduated from Yale Law, and many people in his Venmo network are other graduates of the same prestigious school, according to WIRED.
A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment on the record for this story. The Heritage Foundation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
For years, privacy advocates have criticized Venmo features that create a social-media aspect to personal financial information. When a new user enters the app, it asks permission to access their phone contacts, which can then sync those numbers to a “friend” list on the app. What’s more, friend lists and payment histories on Venmo are public by default, and have to be made private by the user.
Vance isn’t the first politician to generate headlines for a public Venmo account. In 2018, the Daily Beast reported that far-right congressman Matt Gaetz sent an accused sex offender $900 on the app, who then sent three women separate payments equalling the same amount. Gaetz’s office declined to comment on the story, and he was never charged with a crime.
In 2021, BuzzFeed found the Venmo account of Joe Biden in “less than 10 minutes of looking for it,” and was able to map out a vast web of the president’s social contacts including his grandchildren and senior White House officials, posing a potential security issue. It wasn’t until after the episode involving a sitting U.S. President that Venmo allowed users to make their contacts private.
“Venmo takes our customers’ privacy very seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings,” Venmo spokesperson Caitlin Girouard told WIRED. “And we make it incredibly simple for customers to make their account private if they choose to do so.”