In recent years, public government officials’ Venmo accounts have brought a string of embarrassing news stories to a member of Congress, a Supreme Court justice, and even the current president of the United States. But despite these cautionary tales, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has become the latest politician to let his public contacts on the payment app make headlines.
Thursday, Wired Publish a detailed analysis Among Vance’s 211 public Venmo contacts is Amalia Halikias, director of government relations for the Heritage Foundation, the organization running the controversial Project 2025 plan to stack the new Republican administration with conservative loyalists.
Just because two people connected on Venmo doesn’t mean they exchanged payments, but the connection highlights Vance’s ties to the Heritage Foundation. The Ohio senator has given speeches at the foundation and expressed support for policies similar to those outlined in the 2025 plan to reshape the federal government. After Vance was nominated for vice president, the foundation’s chairman, Kevin Roberts, announced that he would serve as vice president. He told reporters “We were actually encouraging him in a special way.”
Democrats have focused their attacks on the 2025 plan, describing it as evidence of the radical policies that will be implemented in Trump’s second term. For their part, the former president has begun to distance himself from it, with Vance making clear his support for the plan shortly before his nomination, saying the plan had “some good ideas” but also “the most important thing is that it is not tied to the Trump campaign.”
Since joining the Senate, Vance has built his policies around populist rhetoric that echoes that of the former president, and has been a vocal critic of elite universities, proposing legislation to ban race in college admissions and cracking down on campus encampments. In a social media post in April, Vance said, “Elite universities have become overpriced daycare centers for spoiled children,” adding that they “no longer serve a useful function.”
Elite universities have become expensive daycare centers for spoiled children.
It is time to impose strict taxes on university endowments. They no longer serve a useful social function and should therefore not receive taxpayer subsidies.
— JD Vance (@JDVance1) April 30, 2024
But Vance’s list of contacts on Venmo paints a more complex relationship with the establishment and elite institutions than he has recently suggested. The senator himself graduated from Yale Law School, and many of the people in his Venmo network are other graduates of the same prestigious school, according to Wired.
A spokesman for Vance declined to comment on this report. The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For years, privacy advocates have criticized Venmo’s features that create a social media aspect of personal financial information. When a new user logs into the app, it asks for permission to access their phone contacts, which can then sync those numbers with the app’s “friends” list. Furthermore, Venmo’s friend lists and payment histories are public by default, and must be made private by the user.
Vance wasn’t the first politician to make headlines for a public Venmo account. In 2018, Daily Beast Reported Far-right Congressman Matt Gaetz sent $900 to an accused sex offender via the app, who then sent separate payments to three women equal to the same amount. Gaetz’s office declined to comment on the story, and he has not been charged with a crime.
In 2021, Buzzfeed Joe Biden’s Venmo account found in ‘Less than 10 minutes of searching for it,“He was able to map out the president’s vast network of social contacts including his grandchildren and senior White House officials, raising a potential security issue. Venmo did not allow users to make their contacts private until after the episode involving a sitting U.S. president.
“Venmo takes our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we allow customers to choose their own privacy settings,” said Venmo spokesperson Caitlin Girouard. Wired“We make it very easy for customers to make their accounts private if they choose.”
