Secret Service officials say threats against the people they protect have surged roughly 40 percent this year and now stand at the highest levels ever recorded, a warning that lands just days before a rescheduled White House dinner where a gunman already tried to kill the president.
Director Sean Curran and Deputy Director Matthew Quinn used a media briefing Wednesday to lay out a threat picture that Curran, a 24-year veteran of the agency, called unprecedented. The agency has opened a record 10,000 threat-related cases so far in 2026, investigations involving not just President Donald Trump but Supreme Court justices and other federal protectees, the Washington Examiner reported.
The briefing came as the White House Correspondents' Association prepares to hold its rescheduled dinner on July 24, three months after a shooter disrupted the original April 25 event and was later charged with attempting to assassinate Trump. Curran told reporters his agents are now analyzing whether buildings at the dinner site could survive explosions, a precaution that would have sounded extreme a year ago but fits an environment the director described in blunt terms.
Curran did not hold back about the scale of what his agency faces. Newsmax reported his remarks at the briefing:
"The numbers at this agency... I've never seen in my 24-year career; they're off the charts."
A senior Secret Service official, speaking without being identified by name, reinforced Curran's assessment. The official said the threat environment for protectees "is the highest we've ever seen" and added: "What we're seeing now is something I've never seen before."
Curran described the broader landscape as dangerously unstable. "The environment has become very volatile, and that's just across the board," he said. "The threat picture and environment is as large as I've ever seen it."
That volatility has played out in Washington itself, where several shootings have occurred this year. And it extends beyond the capital. The FBI recently announced it thwarted a terrorist plot to attack a UFC fight hosted by Trump at the White House, with suspects accused of planning to use explosive-laden drones against attendees.
Quinn used the briefing to flag a threat that has moved from theoretical to operational: weaponized drones. He pointed to the battlefield use of armed drones in Ukraine and to drone activity already detected along the U.S. border.
"We look at Ukraine, we look at just at basic intelligence. It's a matter of time before it comes to the United States."
Quinn added: "It's happening on the border. We know that, so it's absolutely top priority, top of mind, and it comes down to what we're doing to detect and mitigate."
The thwarted drone plot at the White House UFC event gave those warnings immediate weight. If suspects inside the United States are already attempting to deploy explosive-laden drones at events attended by the president, the threat Quinn described is not a future concern. It is a present one.
A bipartisan bill introduced earlier this year would restructure the Secret Service by pulling it out of the Department of Homeland Security and placing it directly under the White House, a proposal that reflects growing concern in both parties about whether the agency's current chain of command can keep pace with the threats it faces.
The rescheduled Correspondents' dinner on July 24 will be the first major return to the venue where a gunman opened fire on April 25. The shooter was charged with attempting to assassinate Trump. The dinner was cut short, though the gunman never reached the ballroom where Trump was gathered with high-profile attendees.
Curran defended the security apparatus that night, pointing to the magnetometer screening system as the point where the threat was intercepted.
"We do expect things to happen at the magnetometers, unfortunately, but that's why they are there. And that's where it happened, and that's where it ended."
He continued: "So it did work. The system worked. We can't shut down an entire community when we have an event."
Trump himself later described slowing the Secret Service evacuation during the shooting, a detail that drew public attention to the dynamic between the president and the agents tasked with moving him to safety under fire.
But Curran's assurance that "the system worked" will face its real test on July 24, when the same event returns under a threat environment his own agency calls the worst on record. The fact that agents are now modeling building survivability against explosions suggests the agency is not simply replaying the April 25 security plan.
Curran's appointment as director followed the two assassination attempts against Trump in 2024. AP News reported that Trump selected Curran, the special agent who personally shielded him on stage after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, to lead the agency through its most difficult period in decades.
That confidence was earned on the stage in Butler, but the agency's institutional failures that day remain a stain. A GAO report released by Sen. Chuck Grassley found that senior Secret Service officials received classified threat information ten days before the Butler rally and never shared it with the agents on the ground protecting Trump. The New York Post reported that the agency had no formal process to relay classified threat intelligence to partners when the threat was not deemed imminent, a bureaucratic gap that allowed a gunman to reach a rooftop overlooking the rally.
Grassley called the breakdown a product of "bad decisions and bureaucratic handicaps" that led to "one of the most shocking moments in political history."
An inspector general investigation later found the agency missed 102 radio warnings about Trump's would-be assassin at the Butler rally. A separate DHS report revealed that a Secret Service agent was searching online for the shooter's rooftop position as gunfire erupted, a detail that captured the confusion and unpreparedness that defined the agency's worst day.
Curran has acknowledged those failures and said the agency is committed to implementing all GAO recommendations. But the record-high threat numbers he disclosed Wednesday show the agency is trying to reform itself while facing a caseload it has never encountered before.
The threat environment is not the only challenge Curran inherited. Breitbart reported that a Secret Service agent, Anthony Pough, was placed on administrative leave and had his security clearance revoked after posting on social media that conservative commentator Charlie Kirk "couldn't circumvent karma" following Kirk's assassination. Pough's social media history also included posts critical of Trump, raising questions about political bias inside the agency charged with protecting the president.
Curran responded with an agency-wide memo warning that politically motivated attacks are "increasing, seemingly every day" and that employees must be "the solution, not adding to the problem." A Secret Service spokesperson said the agency "will not tolerate behavior that violates our code of conduct."
An agency dealing with record external threats and internal conduct failures simultaneously is an agency under extraordinary strain. Curran's briefing Wednesday made clear that the strain is not easing.
The rescheduled Correspondents' dinner now sits at the intersection of every threat the Secret Service described Wednesday: a 40 percent surge in cases, Iranian assassination threats against Trump, a proven willingness by domestic attackers to target the president at public events, and the emerging drone threat that Quinn called a matter of "when, not if."
Curran's team is running building survivability analyses, expanding its detection posture, and preparing for an event that already produced an assassination attempt three months ago. The director says the system worked on April 25. On July 24, the system will face a test that his own agency says comes in the most dangerous environment it has ever measured.
When the people responsible for keeping the president alive say they have never seen anything like this, the rest of the country ought to take them at their word, and hold the institutions around them to a standard that matches the moment.