A provision within President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which he signed into law earlier this month, will allocate an extra $300 million for protecting Mar-a-Lago and other properties owned by Trump — money that Trump could partially profit from, if history is any indicator.
The bill provides that funding in the form of reimbursements to local and state law enforcement whenever Trump travels to his properties, such as Mar-a-Lago in Florida or his Bedminster estate in New Jersey, for example.
Those local agencies have been reimbursed in the past, but not nearly by the extraordinary amount the new law allocates. In fiscal year 2022, for example, $3 million was given to local law enforcement to reimburse expenses they incurred for protecting former President Joe Biden.
The funds are being provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Notably, FEMA funds are now being regulated by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who implemented new “cost-saving” rules requiring that she sign off on any expenditure exceeding $100,000 before it could be allocated. Such rules may have led to a slower response time from the agency during the deadly flooding in Texas earlier this month.
Security for the president, in the form of Secret Service protection, is already funded at a high level. Last year’s budget, for example, prioritized $1.2 billion toward the “Protective Operations” division within the agency, which is responsible for keeping presidents, vice presidents and their families protected. That expenditure is close to half the entire Secret Service’s budget, and 44 percent of the agency’s 8,300 employees work for the division.
Trump has personally profited from Secret Service protection in the past. During his first term as president, he charged the agency $1.4 million for use of his properties and facilities, largely because he traveled to his properties nearly 550 times over the course of his first four years in the White House.
These costs were often “overcharges,” an assessment from the nonprofit watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found.
The Secret Service expenditures amounted to the agency “literally paying Donald Trump for the right to protect him and his family,” CREW staffers wrote in a post on their website about the spending, adding:
Of course presidents and their families need to be protected. But Trump is ostensibly a billionaire … and these were not personal residences.
Trump basically “line[d] his pockets with taxpayer money via his Secret Service protection,” the group went on.
It’s possible that the money allocated to local law agencies could also find its way to Trump’s pockets, if they are reimbursed for expenses incurred at his properties.
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