By Robert McGreevy
The U.S. Secret Service’s budget has increased by nearly $1 billion since 2014, but only $200 million of that has gone to protective operations, according to the agency’s budget.
The agency, which is set to get an additional $231 million in funding from Speaker Mike Johnson’s government funding bill, appears to have funneled more resources into administrative personnel than into protective operations, according to budget documents.
The agency’s total approved budget for the fiscal year 2024 is just under $2.8 billion, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget document. Approximately $1.15 billion of that was allocated for “Protective Operations.”
That’s up from a $1.8 billion total budget in 2014, according to NBC News. Of that $1.8 billion, $924 million went to “Protection,” according to a 2014 DHS budget.
The relatively small increase in protection funds — less than $200 million — is dwarfed by the total budget increase, much of which has gone to line items like Professional Development, Professional Training Programs and “Human Capital Strategic Plan Growth,” which had a $42 million outlay in the Secret Service’s 2023 budget.
The agency also over $200 million on “headquarters, management and administration” in 2024. That line item included 391 employees, according to the budget. They spent an additional $600 million on “Mission Support,” which had 904 employees.
Agency executives, meanwhile, have pinned their recent failures — two high-profile assassination attempts on former President Trump — on a lack of resources.
“We have finite resources and we are stretching those resources to their maximum right now which is going to require us to replace these assets,” Secret Service Acting Director Ronald L. Rowe Jr. said in a Sept. 20 press conference.
Despite the modest increase in protection dollars, the total number of employees on protective detail has actually decreased by over 300 from 2014 to 2024.
In 2014, the outfit listed roughly 6,500 employees. over 4,000 of which were listed as protective detail. By 2024, despite the total number of employees increasing to 8,100, only 3,671 were listed as part of “protective operations,” nearly a 10% decrease.
The decrease in protective personnel does not come from a drop in prospective protectees. In fact, as former Secret Service agent Michael Matranga told the Daily Caller, the agency is currently staffing at least 36 protective details for various government figures and their family members.
This apparent overextension has led Matranga, and others, to question the Secret Service’s “dual-mission,” a long-standing philosophy that gives the agency a mandate to both protect federal officials and combat financial crimes.
“The Secret Service continues to take on more protective assignments, therefore leaving the financial fraud crimes as a secondary option,” Matranga told the Caller.
“Right now, where you’ve got the United Nations General Assembly going on, you have 36 protective details that the Secret Service has stood up. There is not a single individual really in the field offices that are actually working on financial fraud crimes,” Matranga shared.
While the dual-mission was once a necessity for the agency, nowadays, Matranga argued, there are plenty of other outfits like the FBI or Department of the Treasury that can handle financial crime.
“We’re not living in the same time period that we were in 1901 when they decided to go to a dual-mission after McKinley was shot. Completely different time period, a completely different threat landscape, where we have foreign entities wanting to kill these protectees that we have that are vocal about it,” Matranga said.
In addition to the two near-misses on Trump’s life, other threats from countries like Iran have been reported in recent months. (RELATED: Left-Wing Journalist Publishes JD Vance Dossier Allegedly Hacked By Iran)
This elevated threat level, Matranga says, is cause to rethink their dual-mission and focus primarily on protection and investigation.
“The Secret Service should become a threat intelligence and a threat investigative agency, which would complement the protection. You know, that’s what they should solely be, is be very, very, very, very good at threat intelligence, threat investigation and protecting people. That’s what they should be doing,” he told the Caller.
The agency has recovered over a billion dollars from financial crime each of the past two years, according to their budget. They’ve also trained 11,800 law enforcement officers in cybercrime and cyberforensics and provided over 390,000 hours of cyber training since 2023.
The agency added 130 personnel in 2023 for “Field Operations, Cyber Financial Crime, Mobile Wireless Investigation.”
Some, like former Secret Service agent Dean Peterson, argue the division is not as resource-needy as protective operations.
“The bottom line is, you’re always going to need a pretty significant amount of resources to do that protective mission, because that’s where the bulk of all the heavy equipment, whether that’s guns and ammo and cars all kinds of other crazy assets versus counterfeiting,” Peterson told the Caller.
“Everybody needs a computer and a few other forensic pieces. But that’s just not a portfolio in terms of raw equipment and things like that … The secret services capital upkeep is all in equipment. Probably 80 percent of it is directly tied to protective ops,” he said.
Other agency outlays include $600 million for “Mission Support” in 2024 and $149 million for “Other Services from Non-Federal Sources” in 2023.
Acting Director Rowe, in his September press conference, said the agency has had “robust hiring” in the wake of the Trump assassination attempts.
“By the time we close out the fiscal year we’re gonna hire more than 400 special agents this year,” Rowe said. He also said applications for the agency were at an all time high. It is not, however, clear what department the new hires would be allocated to. The Daily Caller asked the Secret Service where the new hires would go but did not hear back by the time of publication.
“They need to assess those 36 full-time protective details and determine, is this something that the Secret Service need to be protecting? Is this cabinet member or the President’s grandchildren? Is that something that the Secret Service needs to be doing, or is that something that we can hand off that responsibility to the FBI, or to the State Department, or the Department of Homeland Security? These low level protective details that are drawing aspects away from the President and the candidates. And let’s reassess that,” Matranga said.
“Imagine how good they would be if they solely focused on threats towards the president,” he concluded.
