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Notes -
They have unlimited funding and a license to do whatever they want like close down all the roads, jam cell phones, etc.
Tough tiddies Trump is difficult to guard. Figure it out.
Their funding is, ah, not unlimited.
They get around $3B a year, which is about the same as the military if New Zealand.
JUST for presidential/former president protection their budget is about a billion and a half dollars.
Yes that’s not literally unlimited, but it is functionally unlimited, and is also more than they even asked for, which would seem to suggest that it may be literally unlimited as well.
That should be more than adequate to keep a kid from crawling up on top of a roof 130 yards from Trump and shooting at him.
https://rollcall.com/2024/07/14/amid-tense-election-secret-service-working-with-already-boosted-budget/
They also handle anti-counterfeiting operations (in fact that was their original purpose) but I'm not sure how much of the budget goes to that.
Edit: Just checked and the "Protective Operations" budget is about $1 billion
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-03/U.S.%20Secret%20Service_Remediated.pdf
So for all practical intents and purposes, given the small number of people the USSS has to protect (all current and former presidents, the VP, parts of their families, current candidates polling over x%, did I miss any?) there's no excuse for them to be spread so thin. Incompetence and administrative bloat are the only reasonable sounding explanations (other than more conspiratorial angles) I can think of at the moment.
Edit 2: So the Secret Service's budget for protective services is roughly the same as the entire military budget of Latvia, a NATO member with a population of about 2 million doing a massive military build up in response to Russia invading Ukraine.
I don't think the problem is (mostly) money, it's that the job is ass/boring and morale is bad. Which I think is party uncontrollable, but still points to a major leadership failure I think. It looks like (ironically) House Republicans gave them more money in 2021 than they asked for, they made a plan to hire more people, and then... just didn't. At least from what I just now read.
This survey report is pretty damning. USSS ranked 413 out of 459 sub-agencies in satisfaction. To be fair, they've been near the bad end for a long time -- 2016 they were rated the absolute worst of any, bottoming out at a 33.8% "engagement and satisfaction" score, though despite their poor ranking that improved to 57.7% as of last year despite their poor relative placement. They were last in the top half of subagencies in 2005 (first year of data), 2007, and 2011 only. So I don't think the USSS problems are recent, but they clearly are severe. Pay also was bottom quartile at 57.7% satisfaction, so one does indeed wonder where the money went after all.
Worth also noting that this most recent score broke down supervisors (80.1%, still ranked 361 only) vs senior leadership (satisfaction only 49.6%, ranked 406). Literally everything in the bottom 25%, then, but the leadership score still stands out.
I think this data supports the idea that leadership is horrible and should be replaced at the very least.
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Man, it’s good to be on top.
Or more accurately—to the be the one doing the protecting, rather than the one being protected.
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