The Secret Service has received significant attention following an attempt to assassinate a presidential candidate. While there may be much to blame, the idea that the agency is starved of resources does not hold water.
Less than two weeks ago, a gunman targeted former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, wounding Trump and two others and killing former Buffalo Fire Chief Corey Competo thunder. Although the Secret Service neutralized the threat within seconds, it was an embarrassment for the agency.
On Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle appeared before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the incident. She has faced fierce bipartisan criticism, with senior members of both parties calling for her resignation. She did just that the next morning, resigning as director of the agency.
The agency has come under legitimate criticism in recent days: The Secret Service is charged by law with protecting sitting presidents, former presidents and major presidential candidates (Trump falls into two of those three categories) and their immediate family members from physical threats. In his written testimony, Chettle called the assassination of Trump “the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades.”
Who or what is to blame for this profound failure? Cheatle said staffing shortages is a problem.
“As of today, the Secret Service has just over 8,000 employees,” Cheatle testified. “We are still working to increase our headcount to approximately 9,500 employees to meet future and emerging needs.”
Chatel was responding to a question from Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), who noted that this is not the oversight committee’s first investigation of the Secret Service in recent years. “Our previous investigation determined that the Secret Service is experiencing a ‘staffing crisis that may pose the greatest threat to the agency,'” a 2015 House Oversight Committee report was quoted as saying. US Secret Service: An agency in crisis.
After the shooting, NBC News reported that over the past decade, the number of agents directly responsible for protecting the president and other officials in protective operations had dropped from 4,027 to 3,671, resulting in “chronic staffing shortages.” At the same time, “the number of people conservation operations must protect continues to grow, and the potential threats faced become more diverse.”
This seems to fit the narrative that has emerged since the assassination attempt: Washington post Reports on Saturday said the agency rejected the Trump campaign’s request for increased security at the event. Secret Service communications director Anthony Guglielmi called the report “absolutely false” and “untrue assertions” in a post on Not for the rallies Trump attended.
But until lawmakers respond by handing out federal checkbooks, it won’t be clear whether a lack of funds is the root cause.
“Secret Service real spending has grown from $2.34 billion in 2014 to $3.62 billion in 2024, a 55% increase over a decade,” Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute wrote this week.
Edwards wrote in 2021 that on an inflation-adjusted basis, the agency’s “expenditures increased from $750 million in 1990 to an estimated $3.26 billion in 2021. Secret Service civilian personnel increased from 5,760 in 2002 7,669 people in 2019, an increase of 33%.” Clearly, the agency does not lack resources.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, seemed to agree. “They have thousands of employees,” he told fox news sundayShannon Bream. “There are not that many people who need Secret Service protection. There are not that many incidents that the Secret Service has to protect. So the budget is adequate to provide adequate protection for presidential candidates.”
This is not the first time in recent years that the Secret Service has publicly failed in its duties. In 2014, a knife-wielding man jumped the White House fence and ran in, just 15 minutes behind President Barack Obama and his daughters. Carol Leonig Washington post The attacker “traversed most of the main floor” and passed through multiple layers of security before being subdued by an off-duty agent, the report said.
Days earlier, a man carrying a concealed weapon violated Secret Service rules when he shared an elevator with Obama; Leonig wrote that when he “acted strangely and failed to comply they stopped filming the president with his cell phone camera” The agents were “flustered” when given the command in the elevator. They just stopped and asked him back The president arrived on his floor and exited the elevator, and for the first time they discovered he had a gun.
Over the past decade, there have been numerous examples of agents getting into bar fights, soliciting prostitutes or getting drunk while they were nominally on duty and tasked with protecting the president. The debacle at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally was clearly not the agency’s first misstep, but it may have been the most serious.
So what if it’s not a lack of resources? yes Was the Secret Service at fault? Civic nerds may remember that before being tasked with protecting the president, the agency was part of the Treasury Department and was responsible for policing fakes. In fact, its investigations so far include financial crimes such as money laundering, ransomware attacks and identity theft.
Edwards told cbs financial watch That may be the problem, the agency is responsible for too many different tasks. “In his view, this oversight is best left to the Treasury Department, allowing the Secret Service to focus on protecting the president and other officials,” the outlet reported.
But most importantly, it’s worth remembering that any government agency will always be less efficient than a private sector agency. If Trump hired private security guards, they would know that their jobs depend not only on maintaining their duties but also on doing their jobs well enough not to be replaced by others.
Regardless, it should be clear that the Secret Service’s problem is not a lack of funding, and lawmakers should resist any calls to pour more taxpayer dollars into it.
