Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Secret Service faces cost cap
Agency has money to cover Trump protection through September.
WASHINGTON — The Secret Service said Monday that it has enough money to cover the cost of protecting President Donald Trump and his family through the end of September, but after that the agency will hit a federally mandated cap on salaries and overtime unless Congress intervenes.
If lawmakers don’t lift the cap, about a third of the agency’s agents would be working overtime without being paid, agency officials said.
“The Secret Service estimates that roughly 1,100 employees will work overtime hours in excess of statutory pay caps during calendar year 2017,” Director Randolph “Tex” Alles said in a statement. “To remedy this ongoing and serious problem, the agency has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security, the Administration, and the Congress over the past several months to find a legislative solution.”
The spending limits are supposed to last through December, but the cost of protecting the president and the extended first family, who have traveled extensively for business and vacations, has strained the Secret Service, local governments and at least one other federal agency, the Coast Guard.
Presidential travel for Trump and the first lady — who fly to their oceanfront Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., or to their golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on many weekends — has added costs for taxpayers and complications for the government. The Secret Service also must provide protection for Trump’s four adult children.
Alles cited overall increases to his agency’s staff levels, which grew by 800 this year, as a factor driving the extra costs, calling the issue “not one that can be attributed to the current Administration’s protection requirements alone.”
He noted that the Secret Service in recent years has frequently received permission from Congress to exceed the overtime and salary cap. This occurred as recently as 2016 during President Barack Obama’s final year in office.
Alles called the agency’s current predicament, first reported by USA Today, “an ongoing issue for nearly a decade due to an overall increase in operational tempo.”
Without question, however, the agency’s workload for security personnel has grown under Trump. The Secret Service now protects 42 people around the clock, 11 more than it did under Obama. The Trump protection number includes 18 members of the president’s family.
The cap has been exceeded by at least some amount in recent years, but fewer agents were affected, usually 300, compared to 1,300 in 2016, when agents protected Obama, Hillary Clinton and Trump during the campaign, according to the office of Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The Secret Service, beset by years of budget shortfalls and leadership shakeups, requested $60 million more for the next year to protect the Trump entourage.