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The Secret Service budget has swelled to more than $3 billion. Here’s where the money goes.
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Monday faced blistering criticism as she directly addressed lawmakers’ questions for the first time about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump earlier this month. A key concern in wake of the shooting: How did a federal agency whose annual budget has swelled to $3 billion fail to stop an amateur assailant like Thomas Matthew Crooks?
While Cheatle didn’t provide an answer at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing, the question points to the Secret Service’s funding and staffing, which as of the 2023 fiscal year has jumped 27% from about $2.34 billion in 2014 on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to an analysis of budget data from the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
On Tuesday, Cheatle resigned from her position after facing pressure during the House Oversight hearing from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers to step down due to the agency’s failure to stop the assassination attempt.
Funding for the agency has increased over the last decade in part due to an incident in 2014, when a man scaled the White House fence and ran through its front doors. Although then-President Obama wasn’t in the building at the time, the incident caused a review of the Secret Service’s training and brought about calls for more funding.
Over the years, those demands have been answered, with lawmakers approving an additional $211 million in funding for the Secret Service in fiscal year 2023 alone, documents show.
Lack of funding doesn’t appear to be the problem that led to the assassination attempt, which appears to be linked to management stumbles, Chris Edwards, a fiscal studies expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, told CBS MoneyWatch.
“No amount of funding will fix the management failures,” he noted. Still, he added that he wouldn’t be surprised if the Secret Service ends up with more funding after the assassination attempt, given the agreement between lawmakers of both parties that the agency had failed in its mission.
“We’ve seen this type of problem before — when there is a management failure at an agency, they almost invariably end up with more funding,” he noted.
Here’s what to know about how the Secret Service spends its funding.
How much is the Secret Service’s budget?
The Secret Service’s annual budget was about $3 billion in the most recent fiscal year, which ended September 30, according to Edwards, who analyzed data from the Office of Management and Data.
About 87% of that budget, or $2.7 billion, is directed toward operations and support, which includes $1.2 billion in funding for Protective Operations — the division that oversees protection for the president, vice president and their families.
The remaining $400 million in annual spending is directed toward procurement, information technology, construction and research and development.
How many Secret Service agents protect the president?
The Protective Operations unit employed about 3,671 staffers in the most recent fiscal year, or about 44% of the Secret Service’s roughly 8,300 employees.
Of course, those agents are spread across multiple assignments, as the agency by law is tasked with more than protecting the president. In addition to the commander-in-chief, the unit must also safeguard the president’s family, the vice president and their family, as well as former presidents and vice presidents and their families, as well as presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Protective Operations is divided into several divisions:
- Protection of Persons and Facilities, which protects presidents, vice presidents and their families, with a budget of $907 million
- Protective Countermeasures, which is focused on protecting the president and vice president at the White House and vice president’s residence from “emerging explosive, chemical, biological, radiological and cyber threats.” It has a budget of $82.5 million.
- Protective Intelligence, which investigates people or groups that pose threats to the president and other protectees. It has a $94.6 million budget.
- Presidential Campaigns and National Special Security Events, which protects “major presidential and vice presidential candidates” and their spouses during the general election. It has a $73.3 million budget.
Others who qualify for Secret Service protection include foreign leaders who visit the U.S., such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrived in Washington on Monday.
During the Monday hearing, Cheatle defended the number of agents assigned to Trump’s rally, saying there were “sufficient resources” assigned to protect the former president.
What are critics saying about the Secret Service’s funding?
Edwards of the Cato Institute noted that the security failure in 2014 was blamed on underfunding. But as he wrote in a July 17 blog post, “If the administration uses that excuse this time, it would not be very convincing because the Secret Service budget has soared in recent years.”
Still, Edwards told CBS MoneyWatch that he questions whether the Secret Service’s mission is too broad, given that it also includes responsibility for investigating financial crimes, such as counterfeiting and identity theft. 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.
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight committee, has said after the assassination attempt that the Secret Service’s annual budget “is more than enough” to provide adequate protection.
“We want to know who’s at fault for what happened,” the Kentucky Republican said.
—With reporting by the Associated Press.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin approved changes to his country’s nuclear doctrine this week, formally amending the conditions — and lowering the threshold — under which Russia would consider using its nuclear weapons. Moscow announced Tuesday that Putin had signed off on the changes to the doctrine, formally known as “The basics of state policy in the field of nuclear deterrence,” as Ukraine launched its first strike deeper into Russia using U.S.-supplied missiles.
The updated doctrine states that Russia will treat an attack by a non-nuclear state that is supported by a country with nuclear capabilities as a joint attack by both. That means any attack on Russia by a country that’s part of a coalition could be seen as an attack by the entire group.
Under the doctrine, Russia could theoretically consider any major attack on its territory, even with conventional weapons, by non-nuclear-armed Ukraine sufficient to trigger a nuclear response, because Ukraine is backed by the nuclear-armed United States.
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine multiple times since he ordered the full-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24, 2022, and Russia has repeatedly warned the West that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire Western-made missiles deep into its territory, it would consider the U.S. and its NATO allies to be directly involved in the war.
U.S. officials said Ukraine fired eight U.S.-made ATACMS missiles into Russia’s Bryansk region early Tuesday, just a couple days after President Biden gave Ukraine permission to fire the weapons deeper into Russian territory. ATACMS are powerful weapons with a maximum range of almost 190 miles.
“This is the latest instance of a long string of nuclear rhetoric and signaling that has been coming out of Moscow since the beginning of this full scale invasion,” Mariana Budjeryn, Senior Research Associate at Harvard’s Belfer Center, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle when the change to Russia’s nuclear doctrine was first proposed last month.
“The previous version of the Russian doctrine adopted in 2020 allowed also a nuclear response to a large-scale conventional attack, but only in extreme circumstances where the very survival of the state was at stake,” Budjeryn noted. “This formulation has changed to say, well, extreme circumstances that jeopardize the sovereignty of Russia. Well, what does that really mean and who defines what serious threats to sovereignty might constitute?”
Budjeryn said Russia had already used weapons against Ukraine that could carry a nuclear payload.
“Russia has been using a number of delivery systems of missiles that [can] also come with a nuclear warhead. So these are dual capable systems. For example, Iskander M short range ballistic missiles. Those have been used extensively in this war by Russia. So when we have an incoming from Russia to Ukraine and we see that it’s an Iskander missile, we don’t know if it’s nuclear tipped or conventionally tipped,” Budjeryn said.
Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandra Ustinova, who says she helped lobby the Biden administration for the permission for Ukraine to fire the ATACMS deeper inside Russia, told CBS News she didn’t believe Putin would actually carry out a nuclear strike.
“He keeps playing and pretending like he’s going to do something,” Ustinova said. “I’ve been saying since day one that he’s a bully, and he’s not going to do that.”
contributed to this report.
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