(Ken Silva, Headline USA) On the heels of two major assassination attempts and a slew of other scandals, the Secret Service is aiming to hire 4,000 new employees by 2028, according to the Washington Post.
The Post reported Sunday 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.
“The agency faces serious obstacles, however, including a shortage of qualified candidates; competition with other law enforcement agencies, especially in immigration enforcement; and bottlenecks in hiring and training, according to former service officials,” the Post reported.
After the Trump assassination attempts, Congress recommended that the Secret Service focus solely on protection instead of forgery and other such investigations.
But the SS Deputy Director says "that was out of the question," per WaPo.
Instead, they'll hire 4,000 new people. pic.twitter.com/PF5ZITCKsb— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) January 4, 2026
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.”
Meanwhile, talks of downsizing the Secret Service’s responsibilities have been abandoned. In late 2024, Congress recommended that the agency should solely focus on protection instead of money-laundering, forgery and other investigations. But Congress never followed up on that recommendation, and Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn reportedly said “that was out of the question,” according to the Post.
“Investigations are the lifeblood of this organization,” he reportedly said.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
