How Much Does It Cost To Protect President? Report Says Secret Service Paid High Room Rates At Trump Properties

The Secret Service reportedly paid room rates as high as $650 on trips accompanying President Trump to his properties.

The Washington Post said it compiled the figures from federal records and the word of people who have seen the receipts.

The Post said it compiled available records, which have been obtained through public records requests by news organizations and watchdog groups, but the total spent is unclear. The paper said it found 103 payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company dated between January 2017 and April 2018. Those records indicate more than $471,000 was paid but that represents only a fraction of Trump’s travel.

The Trump Organization has said it charges the Secret Service only minimal fees. The report, citing documents, said the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate multiple times in 2017 at Mar-a-Lago Club and $396.15 in 2018. At Trump’s National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, the agency was charged $17,000 a month for the use of a three-bedroom cottage in 2017.

A political website, Trumpgolfcount, says Trump has spent 120 days at Mar-a-Lago and 75 at his Bedminster golf club. The site estimates the cost of flights to those properties at some $73 million in just three years.

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free,” Eric Trump told Yahoo Finance last year. “So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50.”

In a statement to the Post, he insisted the company provides the rooms at cost but declined to reveal how those costs are calculated.

The Secret Service said in a statement it has to balance costs with “operational security.” Federal law exempts agents from the government’s per diem spending limits for protecting the president.

Despite rules that require the Secret Service to tell Congress semiannually what it spends to protect the president, the agency has filed only two such reports since Trump took office, blaming the lapse on lack of personnel to handle the task.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., described the Treasury Department’s refusal to turn over figures as part of a bill governing the Secret Service as stonewalling.

“He’s trying to hide the details from the public, because he knows how bad it looks. That’s the truth of it,” he told the Post.

Trump was a vocal critic of former President Barack Obama’s travel and penchant for golf. During the 2016 campaign, he said he would “rarely leave the White House” if he were elected because of the amount of work with which he’d be faced.

Since taking office, however, Trump has spent quite a bit of time at his properties.

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch reported documents it obtained indicated total taxpayer costs for the Obama family’s vacations during his eight years in office totaled more than $114 million.