It took about five minutes to find a dozen members of Congress on Venmo.
Ultimately, over the course of about a week, NOTUS identified the Venmo accounts of more than 50 current lawmakers, more than 20 former members of Congress, and more than three dozen current Trump administration officials and nominees.
For most people, there are plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t want someone looking at your Venmo. For members of Congress and senior officials in Donald Trump’s administration, there are even more reasons to keep your Venmo private.
“Besides the privacy violation that may lead to embarrassing or inappropriate details of your life and associates, one of the risks is that adversaries might target your contacts,” cybersecurity researcher and entrepreneur Katie Moussouris told NOTUS. “If they compromise a close contact, they are more likely to be successful sending a convincing phishing message that appears to be from that person.”
And yet, among all the lawmakers and White House staff NOTUS was able to identify on Venmo, almost everyone had their friends lists open to the public. Some even had public transactions, revealing all sorts of insights into their private lives.
Take, for instance, Rep. Steve Womack. The senior appropriator apparently has a penchant for making bets on major golf championships — or, as he sometimes refers to his losing picks, “donations.”
“Masters 21 Donation” he wrote in a caption to one of his friends on April 6, 2021. None of the majors in 2021 appeared to be kind to Womack. On May 17 of that year, he made a “PGA Donation,” followed by a “US Open Championship contribution” on June 16, followed by a “Donation for poor Open picks” on July 14.
Some profiles don’t give away much. Rep. David Valadao has just one listed friend: a former legislative assistant. But other accounts for these public officials boast hundreds of connections and detail transactions dating back years.
Among the thousands of public transactions NOTUS looked at, there is Rep. Greg Landsman paying his sister for “Some concert I didn’t even go to.” There is Rep. Abraham Hamadeh receiving a payment for “#HookahForFlake.” And there are Rep. Mark Messmer’s payments for “puzzles” and “snow removal” earlier this year.
While most of the transactions appear benign, some of the information — if left public — could be used for more nefarious ends.
In 2023, Rep. Jennifer Kiggans paid a woman for “House cleaning” — appending her exact home address to the transaction description, along with the words, “Thank you sooooo much!!”
That information was left up on her public account from December 2023 until Monday, when NOTUS asked her office about it. The profile bore her full name and included a close-up image of her face, making her remarkably easy to identify.
“These people in Congress and on the executive branch teams, we think of them as people that have done a lot of things and know a lot of things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re particularly internet savvy, and that’s more or less where this all comes from,” application security specialist Bill Sempf told NOTUS. “It does not surprise me at all that you would find a large portion of Congress in there.”
Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell was the Florida Democratic Senate candidate who ran against — and lost to — Sen. Rick Scott in 2024. Her account received payments for “Donation” and “Debbie For Florida!” in the run-up to that election.
Use of Venmo is bipartisan and bicameral. Katie Britt, Roger Wicker and Ruben Gallego were among the senators whose profiles NOTUS easily found.
Those and other lawmakers and White House officials have made an effort to make their transactions private. Or, at least, most transactions are private. It is possible to make all past transactions private, but it’s an option deep in the Venmo settings that many people never seem to find.
Most of the government officials NOTUS identified also have not taken the additional step of making their friends list private. Nor did most of them prevent their profile from appearing on other users’ friends list, which is yet another setting.
While it may seem largely harmless to allow people to look at who you’re connected with on Venmo, security specialists that NOTUS talked to emphasized that it’s a vulnerability — particularly for government officials. Not only is it a potential public tip jar, one that could be used to send direct messages to these influential figures, but it’s also a social network map.
Among the more major names NOTUS found were Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and trade adviser Peter Navarro.
Like most White House officials, all three men have kept their friends list open, providing a window into their connections with journalists, lobbyists and other associates.
Also among the White House staff with publicly viewable friends lists, there is press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff James Blair, newly appointed U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba and White House staff secretary Will Scharf. (Scharf has four listed friends, among them Matthew Foldi, a failed Republican congressional primary candidate who founded the conservative outlet the Washington Reporter.)
Reporters from Politico, Semafor, CNN and The New York Times were often interspersed among the various friends lists for lawmakers and White House officials. In fact, because certain reporters are so well-connected, it made it remarkably easy to find members of Congress and see who may have, at one point, been a source.
To compile our list, NOTUS simply went through the friends lists of a few people with established ties to lawmakers. Typically, one lawmaker would be connected to at least a few other lawmakers, and by going through each lawmaker’s friends list, we quickly built out a constellation of connections, with some friends lists proving to be gold mines.
For example, former Rep. Duncan Hunter’s Venmo was one of the first we found. Among his 234 friends are a number of retired lawmakers. (At the very top of his Venmo friends list is former Rep. Aaron Schock.)
But if you continue through Hunter’s connections, you’ll also find former Reps. Frank Guinta, Jack Kingston, Jon Runyan, Mark Sanford, Mike Gallagher, Patrick McHenry, Renee Ellmers, Sean Duffy, Steve Stivers and Tim Griffin.
You’ll also find Sen. Gallego and, curiously, former Major League Baseball player Aubrey Huff. (Curt Schilling — who, like Huff, dabbles in far-right politics — also comes up as a connection with some Republican politicos and journalists.)
But every former lawmaker connected to Hunter, with the exception of Griffin, had a public friends list. And searching each of their friends lists reveals a similar constellation of lawmakers, lobbyists and staffers.
Going through this exercise again and again, one often sees familiar names and mutual connections.
There is also no shortage of lawmakers who can be easily identified just by searching the app. Several utilize Venmo’s default username format: first name-last name. Some even use their congressional portraits as their profile photos, including Reps. William Timmons, Laurel Lee and Mark Alford.
The fact that so many senior White House officials continue to showcase what is effectively a snapshot of their contacts list on a public account is all the more notable in the wake of the administration’s Signal-gate fiasco last month.
National Security Advisor Michael Waltz inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a group text where senior officials detailed secret overseas attack plans.
Trump was more upset that Waltz had Goldberg in his contacts than anything else, a source familiar with the president’s thinking told NOTUS. If that’s the case, Trump may take issue with so many of his staffers being connected to journalists. (One of the more interesting takeaways from repeatedly going through the friends lists of lawmakers and White House officials is just how many of their connections are reporters.)
Waltz himself had also left his Venmo profile public until recently, when Wired reported on the existence of the account. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also took down his Venmo, and with it his public friends list, after reporting into his account in February. Vice President JD Vance did the same after his account was uncovered in 2024.
The pattern of Venmos being disclosed and then deleted does not appear to have inspired all that many West Wing officials to take basic steps to secure their accounts.
Deputy director of faith engagement Jackson Lane and special assistants to the president Margo Martin and Theo Merkel not only have their friends lists public, they also have some publicly viewable transactions.
Many of the transactions are entirely innocuous. “I accidentally sent the wrong person money can you please accept this so I will not be charged 🙏,” wrote Martin in one payment from years ago.
But some transactions offer insight into the state of mind of some administration staffers.
Just days before Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump sought to overturn the election results, some White House staff took part in what one described as “Not a goodbye party,” per a transaction from then-White House staff assistant Ariel Abergel to then-White House receptionist Chamberlain Harris.
The transaction description aged well. Four years later, Harris is back at the White House.
Several accounts — both from White House staff to lawmakers — detail years worth of transactions, from fantasy football bets to rent and utilities payments, making it clear not only who officials are close with outside of work but, in some cases, who exactly they live with.
“That’s why security clearance exists, to prevent people with big egos from doing stupid stuff like this,” Sempf said. “If any of those people had actually been cleared by the actual security clearance superstructure within the federal government, all of these things would have been found out long ago.”
On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued a memo that allowed a number of staffers to immediately receive “interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearances” for six months.
The White House later stopped the FBI’s background checks into administration officials, moving the process to the Pentagon to “expedite” it, one White House official told NOTUS.
“Trump doesn’t give a shit about the security structure, about people passing clearance — he doesn’t care about any of that,” Sempf said. “He doesn’t think actually anything useful is done.”
A handful of Trump administration nominees also have public accounts, including surgeon general nominee Janette Nesheiwat, ambassador to Canada nominee Pete Hoekstra and secretary of the Army nominee Daniel Driscoll.
The connections stretch across administrations. Deputy assistant to the president Sam Adolphsen is listed as being friends with David Sorensen, who resigned from the first Trump administration after domestic abuse allegations.
The accounts also give insights into administration officials’ connections to various commentators, activists and provocateurs. Staffer Justin Caporale is friends with Sean Spicer, who in turn is friends with Jake Paul, who in turn is friends with ex-Trump official Anthony Scaramucci.
Navarro is friends with Tucker Carlson, who has well over 500 publicly listed friends on his account. Among them are other figures from Trumpworld and conservative media, including Jenna Ellis, the lawyer and Trump co-defendant who pled guilty in the Georgia election case; James O’Keefe, the founder of the far-right activist group Project Veritas; and Benny Johnson, the former reporter-turned-Trump talking head.
Also on that list is Laura Loomer, the fringe activist who successfully encouraged Trump to fire multiple national security officials. She, in turn, is Venmo friends with other far-right figures, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier and white supremacist whom Trump dined with in 2022.
NOTUS also found the Venmo of a prominent DOGE staffer.
Christopher Stanley, a DOGE employee whose Venmo was linked on his public X account, featured a number of public transactions, including one labeled “(.Y.) 😍” and another made up solely of 18 eggplant emojis. Stanley is listed as a principal security engineer at SpaceX, security engineering senior director at X and the chief information security officer at XPayments, the transactions division of X, per information on his account.
A representative for Venmo directed NOTUS to its “Helpful Information” page, which forbids transactions that “are fraudulent” or “violate applicable law.” After NOTUS asked about the possibility of someone sending a payment to a government official and then closing their account so the money couldn’t be returned, Venmo directed NOTUS to its user agreement, which bars the closing of a Venmo account “to evade an investigation.”
Of course, it’s not just the Trump White House that’s chock full of public Venmo use.
Former DNC chair Jamie Harrison and current DNC chair Ken Martin each have hundreds of friends publicly listed on their Venmo accounts. And, in 2021, BuzzFeed News easily identified Joe Biden himself on the app.
NOTUS additionally found a number of former senior Biden administration officials still on Venmo, including former chief of staff Ron Klain, former White House communications director Ben LaBolt and former press secretary Jen Psaki.
Each account is loaded with connections to New York Times reporters and other journalists.
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Matt Fuller, who is Capitol Hill bureau chief at NOTUS, contributed to this report. Jasmine Wright, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.