In July, the US Congress passed the 2015 Secret Service Improvements Act, requiring them to hire at least 200 officers and 85 new agents. The new plan however, involves hiring 700 uniformed officers and 400 new agents over the course of five years, an expansion of almost 17%.
The bill also requires more training for the personnel as reports have found that the Secret Service only spent approximately 25 minutes training the average officer in 2013, Russia-based Sputnik News Agency reported on Saturday.
“This is not just any organization,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, said in a hearing in February. “This is US Secret Service. It used to be one of the most respected agencies in our government.”
Many scandals called attention to what appears to be incompetence in the agency in the last year, such as an armed security guard being allowed in an elevator with President Obama, a knife-wielding veteran hopping the White House fence and making it inside the executive mansion, and drunken agents possibly driving over a suspicious package during a bomb investigation in March.
The new hiring plan will coincide with a projected 16% increase to the agency’s budget, bringing it up to 2.2 billion dollars in 2016. It will be the largest budget the agency has had since being pulled from the Treasury Department and added to the Department of Homeland Security- where it has been forced to compete for funding.