Among the many (many!) scandals and criticisms that have plagued Donald Trump‘s presidency, one of the most enduring has been the president’s penchant for spending time at Trump Organization-owned properties—as the American taxpayer picks up the tab. So it’s no surprise that when it comes to revealing how much the government is actually spending on Trump’s golf games and Mar-a-Lago stays, the Trump administration is a little afraid to fess up. The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is currently pushing back against a proposed provision that would require the Secret Service to disclose how much it’s spending on presidential travel—at least until after voters go to the polls in November.
Per the Post, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is currently sparring with Democratic senators in negotiations over legislation that would move the Secret Service back to the Treasury Department, where it was first housed before moving to the Department of Homeland Security. At Democrats’ urging, the legislation is set to include a stipulation that the Secret Service disclose on a semiannual basis the amount being spent on presidential travel for the president and his adult children. “Secretary Mnuchin came to me last year with a proposal to move the Secret Service to the Treasury Department,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said in a statement to the Post. “As part of that effort, I proposed that the cost of presidential travel be included for greater transparency, accountability and oversight associated with protection during travel of presidents and their families.” But while Mnuchin has agreed to the financial disclosure provision in general, the Trump ally is not on board with Democrats’ insistence that the first disclosure be made within 120 days of the legislation’s passage. The Treasury secretary reportedly hit back against Democrats’ proposed requirements in a December 23 letter, in which Mnuchin “strongly opposed” the 120-day requirement and instead pushed for the disclosures to start next year in 2021.
This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has been cagey when it comes to disclosing the Secret Services’s spending. According to the Post, though the Secret Service is required to report semiannually the cost of protecting the president’s primary non-White House residence, the Trump administration failed to do so in either 2016 or 2017, and has been delayed in submitting subsequent reports. The White House also dodged questions from Congress’s Government Accountability Office about the issue for two years, after the GAO sought information on the cost of Trump’s travel to Mar-a-Lago based on a question in Congress.
There are some hints as to how much the Secret Service is spending on Trump’s travel, however—and as expected when protecting a president who spent one out of every five days on a golf course last year, the agency is likely running up a hefty bill. The GAO found that Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago as president in 2017 cost the Secret Service approximately $1.3 million per trip (and $3.4 million in total government spending), and the Secret Service requested $60 million in additional funding in 2017. Federal charge card expenditures revealed the Secret Service also spent at least $250,000 at Trump properties in just the first five months of Trump’s term alone, and the agency has paid dearly for golf carts on the president’s golf outings, spending $588,000 on golf carts (paid to third-party vendors, not the Trump Organization) since 2017. Beyond the president, there’s also Trump’s children’s jet-setting ways to contend with as well. The GAO report found that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump‘s travels to Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and the United Arab Emirates in 2017 cost the Secret Service $396,000 in total—and they’ve done plenty of traveling since.