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Secret Service Director Complains He Needs More Money To Pay Agents

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The director of the Secret Service is worried that the agency is running out of money, but not because of President Donald Trump’s travel.

USA Today attributed the squeeze of Secret Service funding to the frequency of the Trump family’s travel in a report Monday, but Secret Service director Randolph Alles clarified that the issue has been brewing for more than a decade.

“This issue is not one that can be attributed to the current Administration’s protection requirements, but rather has been an ongoing issue for more than a decade due to an overall increase in operational tempo,” Alles said in a statement.

Alles said the Secret Service “has the funding it needs to meet all current mission requirements for the remainder of the fiscal year and compensate employees for overtime within statutory pay caps.”

About one third of the agents, more 1,000 people, have reached the maximum overtime they can receive this year, USA Today reported.

Alles suggested that Congress could raise the yearly overtime cap from $160,000 to $180,000, which would allow the service to pay agents for more hours above the 40-hour week. If that happened, 130 agents would still not be compensated for all the hours worked.

“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,” Secret Service director Randolph Alles told USA Today. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.”

“We have them working all night long; we’re sending them on the road all of the time,” Alles said. “There are no quick fixes, but over the long term, I’ve got to give them a better balance here.”

While Trump has traveled a lot in his first six months in the White House, and the Secret Service is charged with protecting 41 members of Trump’s family compared to 32 members of former President Barack Obama’s family, the Secret Service has suffered agent attrition due to overwork for years.

Most agents met their overtime cap in June of 2016 during convention season, USA Today reported at the time. Following a number of breaches to White House grounds in 2014, a probe into the Secret Service’s found that agents were asked to work an “unsustainable number of hours.”

“The Secret Service is stretched to and, in many cases, beyond its limits,” the report said.

The service intends to increase its current number of agents from 6,800 to 7,600 by 2019, and to 9,500 by 2025. The agency hired 800 new agents in the past year to deal with understaffing, but only increased the size of the force by 300 agents because of staff attrition.

(Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include the statement from Director Randolph Alles.)

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