SAN FRANCISCO — Did you know you can donate to the United States Treasury Department to help chip away at the country’s constantly growing national debt? Well, those wanting to make donations to the $36.7 trillion debt can now use Venmo and PayPal to do so. But it’s not entirely new. 

Conversations around the months-old change began when an NPR reporter pointed it out on social media. The post quickly generated lots of attention, ballooning up to over 6 million views on X, formerly Twitter, with over 140,000 likes. 

The “Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt” program is offered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service and gives people the option to donate to the national debt by using their debit or credit card, bank account, and now PayPal and Venmo. 

Though the addition of Venmo and PayPal were added in February, the program has been around since the 1960s and was codified into law in the 1980s. 

While the post generated lots of attention, the Treasury says the website and the various payment options are available for more than 1,000 other reasons. Some include fee payments for IRS documents, overdue debts, settling Social Security overpayment notifications and making small business loan payments. 

So while it’s true that since February you could now use Venmo or PayPal to help pay down the national debt, the payment choices were also added for everything on Pay.gov. 

A look at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows the website previously offered “Amazon Account” as a payment option back in 2017. That is no longer available and has been replaced on the site with Venmo. 

So, do people actually donate to the U.S. government to cut at the national debt? Yes. 

According to Treasury data, roughly $67.3 million has been donated since late 1996, resulting in cutting about 20 minutes of the growing debt. The largest contribution amount was made Feb. 28, 2019 for $2.8 million. 

The total national debt has grown by just shy of $55,000 per second for the past year, according to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee. In just the last year, the national debt grew more than $1.37 trillion. 

That increase rate is an average of $4.75 billion per day, $198 million per hour and $3.3 million per minute.

Adding to the debt isn’t a new thing. The national debt has increased every year over the past ten years, going from according to the data from the Treasury.