(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Secret Service received $1.17 billion last year to hire more agents and improve its security, but about $352 million of that amount is being redirected to pay for the White House ballroom construction project, according to the Washington Post.
“The administration’s budget office on Friday disclosed in a public database that it was redirecting $340.8 million and $10.8 million in Secret Service money for “White House Security Measures,” the Post reported Thursday.
A White House spokesman reportedly justified the transfer on the grounds that the ballroom will make President Donald Trump and future presidents safer.
“The East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the President, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets,” spokesman Davis R. Ingle reportedly wrote in a statement. Trump has previously said that the military is building a “massive complex” underneath the property.
The $1.17 billion Secret Service budget increase came from the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress last year.
In January, the Post reported that the service aims to expand its special agent ranks from about 3,500 to about 5,000, hire hundreds of officers to its uniformed division, and add “additional support staff.”
Such a plan would increase the size of the agency by about 20% and bring it to more than 10,000 employees for the first time in its history.
However, it’s unclear how the budget transfer will now affect the Secret Service’s hiring plans. The agency didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Post.
The Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the July 2024 Trump shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, ran a retrospective on New Year’s Eve 2024 that pointed the finger at bureaucratic and resourcing problems for the Secret Service’s failures.
According to that Post article, the Secret Service had a goal in 2021 to increase its workforce from 7,896 that year to 9,595 in 2025. But as of 2024, the agency’s staff had actually shrunk to roughly 7,700 due to high attrition rates. And while its budget ballooned from $2.3 billion in 2017 to $3.1 billion in 2024, so too did its responsibilities. The Post reported at the time that there was a “30 percent increase in security details” during that same time—though it didn’t explain how that increase translated in terms of costs.
“Since 2015, agents with more than a decade on the job have resigned at alarming rates rather than stay until their 20-year retirement mark,” the newspaper continued. “In 2015, veteran agents with 11 to 15 years of experience made up nearly one-third of the Secret Service agent workforce … They now make up just 8 percent.”
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
