The U.S. Secret Service is set to spend $90 million on a contract for a major advertising campaign aimed at dramatically scaling up the size of its force.

Overall the federal agency hopes to attract some 80,000 applicants with around half coming from the campaign, according to contract documents seen by Notus. The news outlet says the contract, the cost of which is highlighted on the government’s Sam.gov website, appears to be the largest the service has awarded to an outside company for recruitment.

One senior homeland security official told Notus, while requesting anonymity, the move was “unprecedented” and “a massive campaign” for the Secret Service.

Anthony Guglielmi, U.S. Secret Service Chief of Communications told The Independent: “The U.S. Secret Service is conducting an aggressive recruitment campaign to rightsize and properly staff the agency to meet the demands of a significantly heightened mission.

“The agency aims to hire 4,000 new employees by 2028, for a total of 6,800 law enforcement personnel and 10,000 total employees on board by that time.

“The agency is on track to exceed our hiring goals for fiscal year 2026 and expect to hire more than 1,000 new special agents and more than 400 Secret Service Police officers by the end of September.”

It comes ahead of a busy 2028 for the agency, with the presidential election and party conventions among other major events, and warnings of a growing number of threats in the country.

A week ago, Secret Service director Sean Curran said the current threat level in the U.S. was “off the charts” thanks to a “volatile” environment.

Curran said he had seen nothing like it in his 24 years on the job, while speaking ahead of the restaged White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C, NBC News reported at the time.

The president had to be evacuated during the original dinner at the Washington Hilton in April after a gunman opened fire. The suspect was apprehended by the Secret Service.

The agency’s ongoing struggles with staffing were laid bare in a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general published in June.

In the partly redacted report, the inspector general found that the Secret Service was understaffed by an average of 21.4 per cent during the 2023 and 2024 fiscal year.

Staffing challenges had led agents to be assigned marathon shifts with little rest in between, with 1.2 million hours of logged overtime causing widespread burnout and exhaustion, the report found. Poor planning had meant the agency had assigned unqualified personnel to protective operations.

The Secret Service has also been relying heavily on external personnel for protection events. In one event, Homeland Security Investigations provided nearly 80 per cent of agents, the inspector general said.

Regarding the new recruitment drive, Guglielmi told The Independent the contract includes nationwide outreach with events planned across the country to help attract applicants. He stressed that while the process will be sped up, standards will not drop as a result.

“At these events, the Secret Service evaluates large numbers of applicants through an accelerated process that reduces the time between certain hiring steps,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“These accelerated events have condesned the hiring process per applicant on average of up to 120 days. The contractor supports recruitment and event logistics; the Secret Service remains responsible for evaluating applicants and making all hiring decisions.

“No qualification, suitability, security or training standards have been reduced or eliminated. The accelerated process condenses the timeline between steps without changing the requirements applicants must meet.”