No, the Secret Service Is Not Underfunded
As lawmakers investigate what went wrong at the Pennsylvania Trump rally, they should resist calls to give the agency more money.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, much attention has been paid to the Secret Service. While there is likely much blame to go around, the idea that the agency is starved for resources doesn't hold much water.
Less than two weeks ago, a gunman took aim at former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, wounding Trump and two others and killing former Buffalo fire chief Corey Comperatore. While 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 received heated criticism from both sides of the aisle, with ranking members from each party calling on her to resign. The following morning, she did just that, stepping down as the agency's director.
The agency has been subject to justifiable criticism in recent days: The Secret Service is entrusted by law to protect against physical threats to sitting presidents, former presidents, and major presidential candidates—Trump falls into two of those three categories—plus their immediate families. In her written testimony, Cheatle called the attempt on Trump's life "the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades."
Who or what is to blame for that profound failure? Cheatle indicated that understaffing was an issue.
"As of today, the Secret Service has just over 8,000 employees," Cheatle testified. "We are still striving toward a number of 9,500 employees, approximately, in order to be able to meet future and emerging needs."
Cheatle was responding to a question from Rep. Stephen Lynch (D–Mass.), who noted that this was not the Oversight Committee's first investigation of the Secret Service in recent years. "Our previous investigation determined that the Secret Service was experiencing 'a staffing crisis that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency,'" quoting from the 2015 House Oversight Committee report United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis.
After the shooting, NBC News reported that the number of agents in Protective Operations—those directly tasked with protecting officials like the president—fell from 4,027 to 3,671 in the last decade, resulting in "chronic understaffing." At the same time, "the number of people that Protective Operations had to protect grew, and the potential threats it faced became more diverse."
This would seem to conform to the narrative that has emerged since the assassination attempt: The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the agency had denied the Trump campaign's requests for additional security at events. Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service's chief of communications, called the report "absolutely false" and "an untrue assertion" in a post on X, before later admitting that the agency had in fact turned down campaign requests, just not for the rally where Trump was shot.
But before members of Congress respond by breaking out the federal checkbook, it's not clear that a lack of funding is the root cause.
"Secret Service real spending has grown from $2.34 billion in 2014 to $3.62 billion in 2024, which is a 55 percent increase in ten years," Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute wrote this week.
Edwards wrote in 2021 that in inflation-adjusted numbers, the agency's "spending increased from $0.75 billion in 1990, to an estimated $3.26 billion in 2021. Secret Service civilian employment increased from 5,760 in 2002 to 7,669 in 2019, which is a 33 percent jump." Clearly, the agency is not starved for resources.
Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, seems to agree. "They have thousands of employees," he told Fox News Sunday's Shannon Bream. "There aren't that many people that require Secret Service protection. There aren't that many events that the Secret Service has to secure. So, the budget is more than enough to provide adequate protection for the presidential candidates."
This is also not the first time in recent years the Secret Service has very publicly fallen down on the job. In 2014, a man with a knife hopped the White House fence and ran inside, only missing President Barack Obama and his daughters by 15 minutes. Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post reported that the assailant made it "through much of the main floor," past multiple layers of security, before he was finally tackled by an off-duty agent.
Days earlier, a man carrying a concealed weapon shared an elevator with Obama, in violation of Secret Service protocols; agents became "rattled" when he "acted oddly and did not comply with their orders to stop using a cellphone camera to record the president in the elevator," Leonnig wrote. They only stopped and questioned him after the president reached his floor and left the elevator, which is when they first discovered he had a gun.
And there have been numerous instances over the past decade of agents getting into bar fights, soliciting prostitutes, or drinking themselves stupid, all while they were nominally on duty and tasked with protecting the president. The failure at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania is plainly not the agency's first screw-up, but it's likely the most consequential.
So then if it's not a lack of resources, then what is wrong with the Secret Service? Civics nerds will probably remember that before it was tasked with protecting the president, the agency was part of the Treasury Department, and it policed counterfeiting. In fact, to this day, its investigative purview includes financial crimes like money laundering, ransomware attacks, and identity theft.
Edwards told CBS MoneyWatch that this may be the problem, that the agency is responsible for too many disparate tasks. "In his view, such oversight would be better assigned to the Treasury Department, allowing the Secret Service to focus on protecting the president and other officials," the outlet reported.
But more than anything, it's worth remembering that any government body will always be less efficient than its private sector counterpart. If Trump had instead hired private security, they would know that their jobs depended on not just keeping their charge alive but doing the job well enough not to be replaced by someone else.
Regardless, it should be clear that the problem at the Secret Service is not a lack of funding, and lawmakers should resist any calls to throw more taxpayer money at it.
