Stories the budget tells

The Secret Service's budget can be quoted two different ways, and they are not the same number. This monitor keeps them apart.

The net discretionary base is the recurring appropriated budget; the annuity contribution is a mandatory pension account the agency administers but does not fund from appropriations. Folding it into the headline overstates the appropriated ask.

The full separation, by appropriation and fiscal column, is on the appropriations page.

The Secret Service does not receive its own audit opinion. Since it moved from the Treasury Department to DHS in 2003, its books consolidate into the Department of Homeland Security's department-wide financial statements — and those statements have earned a clean opinion every year for over a decade.

DHS has posted a multi-year streak of clean opinions, the Secret Service consolidated within. Over the same window the Department of Defense — the largest federal department — has never earned one.

The difference is whether financial data traces, reliably, from a recorded transaction back to its source — the same discipline every figure on this monitor practices. The full record, reconciled to the DHS parent, is on the audit page.

The topline is authority; this is execution. In FY… the Secret Service obligated … in contract awards (USAspending, awarding sub-agency “U.S. Secret Service” under DHS).

Most Secret Service spending is direct — special-agent and officer payroll and protective operations — which is not recorded as contract awards, so this feed is the contracted slice only, well below the agency's net discretionary appropriation. The full feed and the largest awards are on the spending page.

The Secret Service's appropriated base rises across the four published fiscal columns, with the FY2027 request the largest of them.

See the full arc on the history page.