By Andy Sullivan, Helen Coster, Tim Reid and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two months after Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, a gunman hid undetected for nearly 12 hours on the edge of the golf course where Trump played on Sunday under the protection of an agency that is being pushed to its limits.

As the 2024 presidential election enters its final stretch, the U.S. Secret Service is operating with about 400 fewer employees than Congress has authorized, government records show.

The problem is not likely to be fixed before the Nov. 5 election, as the agency typically takes more than 200 days to fill open positions.

Since President Joe Biden ended his re-election bid in July and Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic presidential candidate in a tight race against the Republican Trump, the Secret Service has had to expand its protective coverage to a wider group of officials.

That has placed unprecedented strains on the agency, according to interviews with three former Secret Service agents and a former head of the department that oversees it.

“The pace, the expectations, the pressure has never been worse than it is right now,” Kenneth Valentine, a former agent, said in a phone interview.

Trump’s desire to golf, in private, at one of his Florida clubs on Sunday also meant that agents did not perform the sort of routine site survey that might have led them to find the alleged gunman before Trump came within a few hundred yards of where the man had holed up for hours, with food, near the fifth hole of the Trump International golf course.

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe – who stepped into his role in July when the agency’s former leader resigned after Trump narrowly survived the first assassination attempt – says his agents are already working at high levels of stress.

“We are redlining them,” Rowe said at a news conference on Monday.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress say they could sign off on additional funding in the coming weeks. But that will do little in the short term to fix a personnel shortage that forces agents to work long hours in pressure-filled situations.

The risk of failure was made clear on July 13, when a gunman fired six shots from atop a building at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, killing a rallygoer and grazing the Republican candidate’s ear.

Secret Service agents quickly hustled Trump to safety and killed the gunman, but agency leaders acknowledge he should have never been able to fire shots in the first place.

AGENCY ‘ASHAMED’

Rowe told lawmakers on July 30 that he was “ashamed” of security lapses in the incident.

On Sunday, a Secret Service agent spotted the suspected gunman at the Florida golf course, glimpsing the muzzle of his AK-47-style rifle. The agent opened fire, driving him away before he had a direct line of sight to Trump or could fire a shot.

The suspect, Ryan Routh, was apprehended shortly after.

Still, security experts question why the agency did not find him sooner.

“How was Routh not spotted by an advance team? Did the (Secret Service) use a drone over the golf course? Dogs? If not, why not?” said Lora Ries, who oversaw the Secret Service as a top official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s administration.

Rowe told reporters that Trump’s Sunday golf outing was not announced to the public. That meant that the agency did not mount an intense security sweep beforehand, which could have signaled his imminent arrival.

Trump’s penchant for playing golf on his own courses, which are open to members, creates greater security challenges than past presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who typically played on military courses that could be closed to the public, former agents say.

Trump said Monday he wants more agents protecting him. As a candidate and former president, he is afforded fewer agents and resources than a sitting president.

STAFFING SHORTFALL

The Secret Service employed 7,879 people as of February, the most recent figures available.

That trails a plan that a previous agency director, James Murray, laid out to Congress in 2022, when he said he aimed to have 8,305 staffers within a year and 10,000 by 2027.

Though Congress boosted the Secret Service’s budget by 9% this year to account for the 2024 election, the agency cannot quickly staff up. The demanding nature of the job means that only 2% of applicants typically are hired, Rowe told Congress in July.

The agency also has struggled in recent years to retain agents lured by more lucrative private-sector work, he said.

That shortage makes it more difficult for agents to remain on the job, as they must rush from one assignment to another.

“The Secret Service does not have the resources, it doesn’t have the bodies,” said former agent Bill Gage in an interview.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan, Helen Coster, Tim Reid and Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates)