How do Secret Service costs for Joe Biden in 2022 compare to Donald Trump in 2020?

1. What the claims actually say — close reading of the figures that circulate

The claim set includes two concrete but non‑comparable figures: a near‑$11 million total for Hunter Biden’s travel protection covering 2022–2024 and nearly $2 million that the Secret Service spent at Trump properties in 2020. The Hunter Biden number is presented as an aggregate of hotel, air/rail, and ground transportation costs across multiple trips and years, not a single‑year cost for President Biden’s protection ^{[1] [3]}. The Trump figure reflects expenditures at private properties in 2020 and is a subset of protective costs tied to locations Trump visited, not a full accounting of all Secret Service protective expenses for that calendar year ^{[2] [4]}. Neither figure equals a full presidential protection line item.

2. What official Secret Service reporting covers and what’s missing

Secret Service annual and semiannual reports document protective operations and some expenditure categories but the available documents cited here stop short of delivering a simple yearly “total cost to protect the president” usable for direct comparison. Agency reports from 2019–2022 provide context on visits, missions, and some non‑governmental property security reimbursements, but they do not reconcile into a single, directly comparable presidential‑year dollar figure in the materials cited ^{[5] [6]}. The absence of a consistent, single‑line accounting across the cited sources is the core gap: you cannot compare a multi‑year detail tab like the Hunter aggregate to a property‑expense subset from 2020 and claim a conclusive winner.

3. Operational reasons costs differ year to year and why apples aren’t apples

Protective costs vary with travel patterns, the number of protectees, locations visited, and operational choices such as hotel class or use of commercial versus charter transport. The Hunter Biden reporting highlights expensive hotels and high‑end travel locations that inflate a travel‑detail total, while the Trump‑property reporting highlights repeated visits to private venues that created recurring local expenditures ^{[1] [2]}. Structural differences — who is being protected, where, and for how long — drive divergent cost profiles and make raw side‑by‑side figures misleading without normalization for scope and time frame.

4. How the media slices the data and the likely agendas behind the headlines

Coverage emphasizing the Hunter figure has political salience because it ties a president’s family member to substantial taxpayer‑funded spending, a narrative that can be used to criticize the administration’s judgment or priorities ^{[1] [3]}. Coverage highlighting Secret Service spending at Trump properties frames a different critique — that a president benefited indirectly from government expenditures at his private businesses ^[2]. Both framings are factual in their selected details but each omits context necessary to evaluate overall cost fairness or necessity, and both can be mobilized by partisan actors to support opposing narratives.

5. What would be required to make a defensible comparison

A defensible comparison requires: a single‑year total of Secret Service protective expenditures allocated to the president in each target year; consistent scope (exclude private detail costs for non‑protectee family members unless explicitly comparing those); and breakout by category (lodging, transport, reimbursements) to permit normalization for travel volume and visit frequency. The cited agency reports and investigative pieces provide useful slices but not that normalized dataset ^{[5] [6] [1] [2]}. Only with that harmonized data can one conclude whether Biden’s 2022 protective costs were higher or lower than Trump’s 2020 costs.

6. Bottom line and recommended next steps for verification

Based on the materials cited, you cannot credibly state that Secret Service costs for Joe Biden in 2022 were higher or lower than for Donald Trump in 2020; the data are different in scope and time frame and therefore not comparable ^{[1] [2] [6]}. To settle the question, obtain the Secret Service’s semiannual/annual expenditure breakdowns for calendar years 2020 and 2022 or a Freedom of Information Act request for line‑item protective expenditures and reimbursements. Absent that harmonized accounting, headlines that treat the Hunter $11 million and the $2 million at Trump properties as directly comparable are misleading.