A year after Butler, Sen. Chuck Grassley released a report into what went wrong in the Secret Service. He concludes his introduction with, “As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdictional oversight over the Secret Service, I’m committed to working closely with the agency to ensure they’re properly equipped to repair what’s broken. As an important step, I allocated $1.17 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill to provide the Secret Service with additional funding. I’m hopeful this significant injection of resources will go a long way in bringing the agency up to speed.”

The problem with the Secret Service is not a lack of money although that is what Secret Service leaders tend to claim every time this happens.

Take for example one of the alleged failures during the Trump assassination was that Secret Service personnel had trouble getting a phone connection. There was no real excuse by a federal agency charged with protecting high value targets in 2024.

The Secret Service had an over $3 billion budget. Having reliable communications doesn’t cost billions.

I previously broke down the SS’s budget.

Does the Secret Service actually need more money? It has a $3 billion budget. That’s around double what it was in 2000.

Only about $1.2 billion of that goes to protective operations and only about $73 million gets spent on providing security at presidential campaigns. $138 million gets spent on training and professional development.

After the Trump hit, the Secret Service was so desperate for money that it spent millions on a Super Bowl ad directed by Michael Bay.

All the while, the Service has spent a decade claiming that having agents monitor and communicate with each other is some dark voodoo magic.

When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited D.C. Secret Service “agents said they marveled at what their Israeli counterparts brought — including a portable security camera network that delivered live feeds from key spots in the prime minister’s hotel. The Secret Service has its own mobile camera system. But agents say it is so unreliable it is rarely used.”

Teens could put together something like this. But the Secret Service somehow can’t. And this isn’t new.

In 2014, a mentally unstable man jumped over the White House fence, overpowered an armed female Secret Service agent, and made it to the East Room before an off-duty agent about to leave for the night finally took him down.

In 2014, the Secret Service blamed malfunctioning radios that made it difficult to track the intruder. In 2024, the Secret Service once again blamed malfunctioning radios.

The $1.7 billion isn’t going to fix a fundamentally broken agency.