Does the Secret Service really need "more help"? Or do they and their parent organization need better leadership?

Joe Biden expressed relief that Donald Trump escaped unharmed after this second attempt on his life. He then proceeded to pass the buck back to Congress:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Biden says the Secret Service 'needs more help' after Trump targeted in apparent assassination attempt.

— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) September 16, 2024

Gee, that's not a bad idea. So who's in charge that could make that happen? I bet Biden knows someone who can make those decisions. You know, someone who actually makes the decisions and can direct Cabinet members through something called an executive order. At one point, Joe Biden used to express quite a bit of fondness for those, too.

It's becoming clear that something needs to change at the US Secret Service, but the problem appears to be operational rather than budgetary. The USSS has operated under the Department of Homeland Security ever since the 2006 reorganization that created DHS. Currently, Alejandro Mayorkas runs DHS as its Cabinet-level Secretary and has been responsible for the worst crisis on the southern border since Pancho Villa raided American communities a century ago. It's no small wonder that someone who has spent three years failing to protect Homeland Security in a literal sense has performance problems when running subordinate agencies like the USSS.

What about funding? DHS has a nominal budget this year of just over $101 billion, but according to the government's budget-spending site, it has access to around $189 billion. Over $6 billion has been committed to its "management directorate," using the latter number. The USSS has just under $4 billion; DHS spends 50% more on its management directorate alone than they give the entire USSS. If they need more resources, perhaps Mayorkas and Biden could redirect it from management into field resources.

The numbers from the USSS on personal protection costs are more specific. They don't suggest that they're being starved by Congress, either. The USSS has $1.031 billion budgeted for personal protection in this fiscal year, which is almost double the budget from FY2016 ($509.8 million). That may be due to having more protectees, but 2016 was an election year too, and didn't seem to feature so many Secret Service f***-ups. The budget in FY2020 was $754.5 million, and that again seemed sufficient for purpose ... under different management. 

But even if there's a resource shortage, DHS and the White House can move money around within DHS to deal with it. Congress doesn't earmark funds any longer, and even when they did, they didn't earmark a large percentage of it. Mayorkas and Biden can choose what priorities should get more funding within DHS without Congressional intervention. 

All it would take is leadership. But leadership has been absent at DHS for the last three-plus years, and absent at the White House too. 

Once again, however, people are raising the question about DHS running the USSS. Until that 2006 re-org, the Secret Service operated within the Department of the Treasury, thanks to its jurisdiction over counterfeiting. There have long been complaints about that as a poor fit, operationally speaking, and the sense that the USSS gets lost among other DHS priorities. That may be true in a general sense, and it's certainly true that the Secret Service has had a number of issues in the past 18 years. However, some of those issues predate the DHS re-org, and in any case, the leadership issues seem less about the organization than the quality of leadership specifically within DHS. 

All of this suggests that Biden wants to pass the buck for his incompetent governance to a Congress that has been rather generous with both DHS and the Secret Service. In this case, though, the buck properly stops with both Biden, Mayorkas, and Kamala Harris as Biden's supposed key partner in governance.