Secret Service Unveils Historic Hiring Blitz for 2028 Olympics and Presidential Election

By Charlie McCarthy | Sunday, 04 January 2026 08:50 AM EST

The Secret Service is reportedly aiming to hire an unprecedented number of agents and officers ahead of the 2028 Olympics and that year’s presidential election.

The agency has launched one of its most aggressive hiring campaigns in history, seeking to add roughly 4,000 new employees by 2028. This dramatic expansion is meant to relieve a workforce strained by nonstop protective demands, rising threats, and years of attrition.

The plan would grow the agency by about 20%, pushing total staffing past 10,000 for the first time. Deputy Director Matthew Quinn is spearheading the effort, with Secret Service Director Sean Curran backing the push. Curran previously led President Donald Trump’s protective detail, and the leadership team is making recruiting “second only to protection,” according to reports.

The hiring surge underscores the reality that the protective mission is expanding while the federal bureaucracy struggles to keep up. Quinn told reporters: “The protective mission has expanded. Our numbers are low to meet those needs. We have to achieve what we said we were going to do 10 years ago. We’ve got to achieve it now.”

Threats against national leaders have risen, travel demands are relentless, and major events such as the 2028 presidential election and the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics will test security planning on a scale not seen since the post-9/11 era. Quinn added: “No matter what, I don’t care how successful we are—it’s still going to be a rough summer.”

The Secret Service is also working to recover public confidence after last year’s shocking security failure at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the president survived an assassination attempt. Poor coordination with other law enforcement agencies contributed to the breakdown—a warning sign as the nation heads toward another high-stakes election season.

To speed hiring without lowering standards, the agency is leveraging a new Accelerated Candidate Event model. This process condenses multiple assessments—including entrance exams, physical ability tests, interviews, medical exams, and polygraphs—into a four-day timeline that can cut up to 120 days off the standard processing period for applicants. More than 775 applicants attended the first event in November, with roughly 360 advancing.

Former officials cautioned, however, that the plan faces steep hurdles including competition from other law enforcement agencies, a shortage of qualified candidates, and training bottlenecks at the federal law enforcement academy. One former Secret Service senior official told reporters: “I hope they have success in getting those numbers as much as anybody, but it’s not realistic. There’s no part of law enforcement that’s not struggling to hire.”

Roughly one-third of the workforce is expected to be retirement-eligible before 2028.