There are ways Trump can ease agents’ burden
Duties to first family overwhelm financially strapped Secret Service
“I alone can fix it,” Donald Trump famously declared as he accepted the presidential nomination last summer. When it comes to the serious budget crisis facing the president’s Secret Service, that might actually be true.
As USA TODAY first reported Monday, the Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents, who are grappling with protecting a president who spends almost every weekend traveling to properties he owns on the East Coast and the 18- member first family’s frequent business trips and vacations. Director Randolph “Tex” Alles said more than 1,000 agents already have hit federally mandated caps on annual salary and overtime allowances meant to last the whole year.
Congress would have to intervene to get these agents paid. But former Secret Service officials and ethics experts say there are some simple ways that Trump himself could ease the financial burden he and his family are putting on the men and women who protect him. Trump could:
SPEND MORE TIME AT WHITE HOUSE
“That would help solve the problem,” said John Magaw, a former Secret Service director who began his career nearly three decades earlier as an agent under Lyndon Johnson in 1967.
Since his inauguration, Trump has taken seven trips to his estate in Mar- aLago, Fla., traveled to his Bedminster, N. J., golf club five times, and returned to Trump Tower in Manhattan once. Since Trump has a semi- regular presence at each resort, it’s more costly to keep up the security infrastructure than a quick pop- in.
What’s more, Trump properties are expensive, and the agency is not al- lowed to accept any funding or resources that Congress hasn’t appropriated. That would include hotel rooms at Trump- owned properties, said another former Secret Service director, W. Ralph Basham, who says these regulations would guard the agency from any possible compromise of its protective mission.
Since Trump is unable to toss the Secret Service any freebies, it would be up to him to adjust his travel.
“The president could prevent this problem by changing his behavior,” said Walter Shaub, who until last month was the director of the Office of Government Ethics. “He could stay in town and do some work – and not go off frolicking on golf boondoggles to his own properties.”
SWAP RESORTS FOR CAMP DAVID
Magaw recommends Trump limit his travel to the customary one or two vacations a year, the White House and Camp David, the rural Maryland retreat presidents have frequented since the early 1940’ s —“and the absolute necessary foreign trips, while this is getting fixed.” From Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama, that’s what presidents have done to save federal dollars and minimize the stress on federal agents and their families who face long stretches away from spouses and children.
“That really saves money,” Magaw said. The president’s jaunts to Mar-aLago are estimated to cost at least $ 3 million each, based on a General Accountability Office estimate.
LET CHILDREN DECLINE PROTECTION
Trump can’t pay for his own Secret Service protection, said Scott Amey, chief counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, since it could raise legal issues under the Anti- Deficiency Act. Yet Trump’s immediate family is allowed to decline Secret Service protection.
There is precedent for families declining protection, said former agency director Basham, who oversaw operations from 2003 to 2006.