The US Treasury has added Venmo and PayPal to its decades-old public debt donation programme. Theupdate appeared on Pay.gov, the federal government's official payments portal, and sparked viral attention after a post on X highlighting the option drew millions of views.

The'Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt' programmehas operated since the 1960s under federal statute, accepting contributions from citizens who wish to reduce a debt now totalling approximately £30.2 trillion ($39 trillion).

The voluntary donation scheme pre-dates the internet, the moon landing, and most of the legislators now debating fiscal restraint. Under31 U.S.C. § 3113, the Secretary of the Treasury holds legal authority to accept contributions from the public for the sole purpose of reducing the outstanding national debt.

The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Treasury sub-agency that administers Pay.gov, added Venmo and PayPal as payment options in late 2024 and February 2025 as part of a broader modernisation of the platform, which handles more than 1,000 categories of federal payment.

U.S. government is accepting donations to pay off its $39 trillion debt via PayPal and Venmo.

An archived review of the Pay.gov site shows that Amazon Account was once listed as a payment option; it has since been replaced by Venmo. The update drew scant attention until an X post by NPR journalist Jack Corbett went viral in July 2025, accumulating more than 6 million views and 140,000 likes.

A second wave followed in February 2026 when screenshots framed the page as the government 'crowdfunding' its debt.Fact-checkers notedthat the framing was misleading: the Venmo integration was a routine infrastructure change, not a targeted response to fiscal emergency.

🇺🇸 US Government is collecting donations to help pay off its $39 trillion debt.pic.twitter.com/PtebafQ0Dz

Treasury data confirm that roughly £52 million ($67.3 million) has been donated to the programme since late 1996. An Axios analysis calculated that sum represents approximately 20 minutes of national debt growth.

The maximum single transaction permitted by Venmo is $999,999.99; at the current rate of debt accumulation, that contribution would cover roughly 18 seconds. As of early April 2026, the total national debt crossed the $39 trillion threshold, according tomonthly debt data from the Joint Economic Committee of the US Senate, which tracks figures published daily by the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service.

Source: International Business Times UK