Why Pete Hegseth’s public Venmo account matters
The public Venmo accounts of the likes of Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz reflect a worrying lack of security awareness among prominent Trump Cabinet officials.

Nearly lost in last week’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Signal group chat security lapse was the role of a different kind of app, one at least as popular as Signal, in further revealing the flawed security protocols among some of the same, most highly targeted officials in our government. Reports showed that the Venmo accounts of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz, among others, were left public, revealing the officials’ personal contacts on the app.

The digital payment application Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, is the third-ranked payment system among the 60% of Americans who use such apps to pay for purchases. Instead of pulling out our credit cards, over half of us pull out our phones, at least twice a week, and use a digital payment app. So do several of the senior participants in the Signal group chat involving the U.S. plan to attack Houthis in Yemen, apparently. But unlike the average person, the way they use it poses critical security risks and questions.