The following article by Barbara Demick was posted on the LA Times website May 8, 2017:
On the Thursday evening before Easter, photographers staking out Palm Beach International Airport in Florida awaiting President Trump were surprised to see not one, but two Air Force planes arriving within minutes of each other.
Shortly before the president landed, Melania Trump arrived on a Boeing C-32 — a military version of a 757 — with their 11-year-old son, Barron, and other family members to spend the holiday at the Mar-a-Lago golf resort. Her one-way trip from New York, where she lives separately from her husband so their son can finish the school year, cost taxpayers more than $110,000.
Nobody questions that the safety of the president and his family is of vital national interest, or that the costs of first family travel and protection have soared in the age of terrorism.
But a unique set of circumstances has made the current presidential family the most expensive in history. There is no standard methodology to tally travel and protection costs, but based on publicly available information reviewed by The Times, the total for Trump’s first 100 days was at least $30 million. By comparison, the conservative think tank Judicial Watch found that costs for President Obama and his much smaller family averaged $12 million a year.
In the federal budget compromise reached last week, Congress allocated the Secret Service an additional $13 million to cover unanticipated overtime for its agents. It also set aside an extra $61 million to reimburse New York and Palm Beach for some of their expenses incurred since the election to protect the first family.
“Although the federal government does not otherwise reimburse costs of state or local law enforcement for activities in support of the United States Secret Service protection mission, these funds are being provided in recognition of the extraordinary costs borne by a small number of jurisdictions in which a residence of the president is located,” the budget bill stated.
The jump in costs is largely due to the fact that Trump has used three separate residences — the White House, Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago. Over the weekend he added a fourth: the Bedminster, N.J., golf club where the family has traditionally spent summer weekends.
In addition to protecting the president and first lady, the Secret Service guards five children, their three spouses and eight grandchildren — 16 people in all. Since the election, Secret Service agents have accompanied the president’s two adult sons on business trips to Dubai, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Ireland and Scotland. Each “protectee” — as they are called by the Secret Service — gets his or her own security detail even when traveling together.