Lawmakers complain about Trump’s security costs
Florida members of Congress have asked the Justice and Homeland Security departments to reimburse Palm Beach County for hundreds of thousands of dollars spent protecting President-elect Donald Trump when he stays at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Sens. Bill Nelson (D) and Marco Rubio (R) and Reps. Alcee Hastings (D), Ted Deutch (D), Lois Frankel (D), and Patrick Murphy (D) asked the agencies to use funds allocated by the continuing resolution Congress passed last month to repay the county for its expenses.
Palm Beach County Mayor Paulette Burdick told the federal representatives that protecting Trump cost the county about $250,000 for four days over the Thanksgiving holiday.
{mosads}Trump is spending 10 days at Mar-a-Lago over the Christmas holiday. Palm Beach County does not have an estimate for how much it will spend on security during this visit.
The funding bill Congress passed before adjourning for the year allocated $7 million to pay for local police costs associated with guarding the president-elect. But that isn’t likely to cover the millions of dollars local departments have already spent on overtime and other costs.
New York City asked Congress to reimburse its police department $35 million in security costs incurred since Trump won November’s elections. John Miller, the deputy police commissioner in New York City, called Trump’s security “an unfunded federal mandate.”
A federal law from 1976 caps reimbursements for local police departments at just $300,000 per year, and $70,000 for using a local airport. In a letter to Congress, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called those amounts “drastically inadequate.”
Costs for protecting Trump are expected to rise once he’s sworn in. But state and local governments are not always reimbursed for their trouble: Honolulu’s police department has never been reimbursed for the $250,000 or so they pay officers in overtime every year that President Obama has spent the Christmas holiday in Hawaii, the department told the Palm Beach Post.
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