ANALYSIS — Much will be made of security lapses on the part of the U.S. Secret Service in the run-up to Saturday night’s assassination attempt on the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump. One thing seems clear though: Any errors in judgment or personnel deployment don’t appear to be for lack of money.
Lawmakers took their time approving final appropriations for the Secret Service this fiscal year, with the final Homeland Security Department spending package becoming law nearly six months late. Part of that was due to overall disputes over how much money to give nondefense agencies under tight budget caps, and ultimately appropriators had to go to great lengths to find offsets for more Secret Service funds — for instance, draining the previously untapped fund for public financing of presidential campaigns.
But the result was a more than 9 percent increase for overall Secret Service appropriations in fiscal 2024, to nearly $3.1 billion, exceeding President Joe Biden’s request by $78 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s larger than in any presidential election year — when the Secret Service tends to get a boost — going back two decades.
The overall “protective operations” category — the main source of funding for day-to-day protection of presidents, vice president and their families as well as former presidents and their spouses — was funded at $1.4 billion, a 24 percent increase and again exceeding the president’s request. Within that total, money specifically for presidential campaigns and “national security special events,” like the nominating conventions, more than tripled over the previous fiscal year, to $244 million.
It’s typical for Secret Service protective operations funding to look like a roller coaster over time, jumping each presidential election year and then dropping off.
In fact for fiscal 2025, the Biden administration requested a 14 percent cut to protective operations, including a 57 percent cut for presidential campaigns and national security special events. Secret Service funding overall would drop to $2.9 billion.
The House-passed, GOP-drafted fiscal 2025 Homeland Security spending bill would reject some of the proposed cuts to protective operations, but still leave those accounts below the current fiscal year’s funding, which is absorbing most campaign-related costs.
Specific pots of funding for protective operations are difficult to track over longer periods of time because of the different ways successive administrations and congresses have grouped accounts together.
On the surface, it appears that funding set aside specifically for protection of officials and candidates was larger in fiscal 2016 when adjusted for inflation, and about the same as four years earlier. Fiscal 2020 amounts dropped off, probably given the nature of pre-vaccine campaigning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It also looks like other Secret Service functions have elbowed their way to a bigger share of overall agency appropriations in recent years. Larger proportions have gone to accounts including field operations, for example, which fund the Secret Service’s role in combatting financial crimes like credit card fraud, identity theft and ransomware attacks.
That may prompt a look at how lawmakers and the White House decide to slice up future Secret Service appropriations, and spark discussion of how much is adequate for the agency within overall domestic funding needs. But there’s probably little Congress can do to pump more resources into the Secret Service at this stage of the 2024 campaign that would make much of a difference, nor much reason to think they have an interest in doing so.
New York Reps. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, and Republican Mike Lawler said Sunday they plan to introduce legislation that would require “enhanced” protection for Biden, Trump, or any other major candidates, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Several members from across the political spectrum, including House Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green, R-Tenn., and Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who is running for the Senate, have demanded answers and documents about the security failures at Saturday’s event. Biden said Sunday he was ordering an independent review of the security at the rally. And House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James R. Comer, R-Ky., said Saturday he was going to schedule a hearing with Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.
The post Amid tense election, Secret Service working with already boosted budget appeared first on Roll Call.
