Heads Up, Ladies of the Night: Secret Service to Hire 1,100

Via Reuters:

Facing accusations that it cannot adequately protect the White House, the U.S. Secret Service plans to hire 1,100 more officers and agents for an agency besieged by embarrassing scandals and security lapses, two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the plans said.

The addition of 700 uniformed division officers and 400 agents over five years would expand its staff of 6,647 by nearly 17 percent, the biggest hiring increase in more than a decade at the 150-year-old agency whose job it is to protect the president, his family, and senior officials, along with fighting financial crime.

The Secret Service is trying to rebound from a leadership crisis and mend a culture of covering up mistakes that some trace back 12 years to when it was pulled out of the Treasury Department and absorbed into the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security, where it had to compete for turf and money.

Only the fiscal vampires in the federal bureaucracy reward scandal and mind-numbing incompetence with a bigger budget for a hiring spree.

That this is a symptom of the plague that is the Department of Homeland Security is unsurprising. Throwing a massive new layer of bureaucracy at our security problems never was a smart move. It’s also the reason I laugh when people on either side of the aisle refer to George W. Bush as a conservative. A real conservative never thinks a whole lot of new government is the answer to anything.

Now we are supposed to unquestioningly believe that the problem is that Secret Service didn’t have the budget to keep a watchful eye on the White House fence.

Here’s a solution: take any money Secret Service needs from EPA’s budget.

I’ll be forming my own exploratory committee now…