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The Secret Service has launched one of the most ambitious hiring efforts in its history, seeking to bring on thousands of agents and officers to ease strain on its overstretched workforce and prepare for multiple major events in 2028, including the presidential election and the Olympics.

Service leaders say they want to hire 4,000 new employees by 2028 — a surge that law enforcement experts say has no clear precedent and reflects mounting concerns about staff burnout, a loss of experienced agents, and a relentless operational tempo. The added staff would make up for expected retirements and increase the size of the agency by about 20%, to more than 10,000 for the first time.

Under a plan led by Deputy Director Matthew Quinn, the service aims to expand its special agent ranks from about 3,500 to about 5,000. Officials also want to add hundreds of officers to the Uniformed Division, for a total of about 2,000, and hire additional support staff. The figures have not been previously reported.

The agency faces serious obstacles, however, including a shortage of qualified candidates; competition with other law enforcement agencies, especially in immigration enforcement; and bottlenecks in hiring and training, according to former service officials.

A previous attempt to reach 10,000 employees over a roughly 10-year period ending in 2025 failed as the agency struggled with leadership turnover and disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic, among other issues. The service fell far short of recruitment and retention goals despite offering some of the biggest financial incentives of any federal law enforcement agency.

“Our mindset is, we aren’t going to pay our way out of this,” said Quinn, a longtime Secret Service official who returned to the agency in May after several years in the private sector. “We can’t create enough incentives to negate the fact that we’re working our people very, very hard.”

Quinn said he and Secret Service Director Sean Curran, the former head of President Donald Trump’s protective detail, have set out to make hiring a top priority, second only to protection. Senior administration officials have backed them, he said.

“The protective mission has expanded,” he said. “Our numbers are low to meet those needs. We have to achieve what we said we were going to do 10 years ago. We’ve got to achieve it now.”

Agency officials want to improve the quality of life in the service by shortening hours and reducing time on the road for officers and agents, many of whom spend months each year traveling on protective assignments.

A larger staff could also allow the Secret Service to lean less on other law enforcement agencies for help securing high-profile events, giving it tighter control over venues. Poor communication with other agencies played a major role in the service’s most publicized failure in recent years, the attempted assassination of Trump in 2024 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

Some former officials questioned whether the service can achieve its goal.

“They are going to have to eliminate all the management and red-tape barriers,” said Janet Napolitano, a former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the service’s parent agency. “They have to be able to swiftly recruit, maintain quality, and train that number of new agents. They’re going to have to turn headquarters into a hiring machine.”

In 2024, Napolitano helped lead a bipartisan investigation of the Secret Service failures that led up the Butler assassination attempt, the first time a president or former president had been fired upon since 1981.

Others said even more modest hiring targets could be a stretch on such a short timeline. Getting hired and trained for a job in the Secret Service is a long, strenuous, and heavily bureaucratic process, even by federal government standards. It involves multiple rounds of interviews, an intensive background check, and a notoriously tough polygraph test that officials say screens out some otherwise strong candidates.

All of those steps place heavy demands on already understaffed field offices, according to a former Secret Service executive familiar with the process, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity due to concerns about retaliation. The former executive said it was difficult to see how the agency could clear those hurdles while significantly expanding the workforce.

“I hope they have success in getting those numbers as much as anybody, but it’s not realistic,” said another former senior official, who retired recently. “There’s no part of law enforcement that’s not struggling to hire.”

Service leaders are adamant that they are not lowering standards to meet their goals.

Some service officials had floated the possibility of curtailing or suspending the investigative portion of agent training, focusing only on the protective portion of the service’s mission, according to people familiar with the discussions. But Quinn said that was out of the question. “Investigations are the lifeblood of this organization,” he said.

Instead, officials say, they have found ways to speed the process.

In November, the service held the first of what officials expect to be multiple accelerated hiring events in which candidates complete assessments over several days, including a physical fitness test, a security interview, and a full polygraph.

Historically, those assessments have taken months, according to Delisa Hall, the Secret Service’s chief human capital officer. About 350 candidates out of nearly 800 who attended the first event advanced to the next phase, she said.

“It’s becoming evident that this may be our new normal to push applicants through,” she said.

Agency officials say they have compressed the timeline for a job offer down to less than a year from the previous 18 months or more and hope to cut the timeline by roughly another four months. The long wait in the past has led some candidates to withdraw or take positions with other agencies that moved more quickly.

Hall said the agency is recruiting from the military, college athletes, and law enforcement, and it’s staying more engaged with applicants to keep from losing people along the way.

Getting new hires trained and field-ready on time could also present challenges as the Secret Service races to staff up.

Officials say the service has secured 42 classes at the federal government’s main training center for law enforcement agents in Glynco, Ga., for the 2026 fiscal year. All the service’s new agents and officers must undergo basic criminal investigator training at the facility, known as FLETC, for about three months alongside recruits from other agencies.

The campus is expected to remain packed for the foreseeable future with recruits from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other immigration agencies hired as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown. Secret Service leaders say they have not had to compete for space. But several former officials said they worry the service’s recruits could take a back seat to training for ICE or the Border Patrol, both of which are hiring aggressively.

The pressure on the agency will only mount as 2028 approaches. Some in the Secret Service have privately referred to the year as “Armageddon” because of the extraordinary security demands posed by the election and other major gatherings, including the Los Angeles Olympics, the first Summer Games in the United States since Atlanta in 1996.

The workforce carrying out the mission could look dramatically different from the last election cycle. Many experienced agents have departed for other agencies or jobs in the private sector in recent years. Others from a large cohort hired in the years surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks may not stay for another breakneck campaign.

“About a third of the workforce will be retirement-eligible before the start of 2028,” said Derek Mayer, a former deputy special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Chicago field office. “That’s definitely a cause for concern. There were periods during hiring freezes in the 2010s when we didn’t hire anyone. When that happens, it does hurt, but it hurts five or 10 years later.”

With Trump term-limited, both major parties are expected to have competitive primaries, raising the number of people the service will have to protect. The eventual nominees, their running mates and their spouses will receive full-time Secret Service details.

The agency is also tasked with coordinating protection around the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, scheduled during the last two weeks of July and the last two weeks of August, respectively.

“No matter what, I don’t care how successful we are,” Quinn said, “it’s still going to be a rough summer.”

The United States will “run” Venezuela — a country of 30 million people spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles — for the foreseeable future, President Donald Trump said Saturday just hours after the shocking, early morning U.S. military assault that captured its head of state and left Latin America and much of the rest of the world reeling.

“We’re going to stay until … the proper transition takes place,” Trump said in a Florida news conference that glanced past details of how exactly that would be done.

Two side benefits, he indicated, were that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who had fled to the United States would now go home and that the U.S. would now be able to take over the Venezuelan oil industry.

On social media, Trump posted a photograph of shackled and blindfolded Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima. Maduro and his wife, both under U.S. indictment for drug trafficking and corruption, were snatched from a safe house by U.S. Special Operations forces in what senior administration officials insisted was not regime change but a law enforcement operation for which the military provided security.

The Maduros, officials said, were read their rights by an FBI official on the ground before being whisked away in a helicopter. Asked if U.S. forces were prepared to kill Maduro if he resisted, Trump said, “It could have happened.”

Trump made no distinction between law enforcement and overthrow, seeming to exult in what he called a “spectacular” operation, the likes of which had not been seen “since World War II … one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said. “Under the Trump administration we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region.”

Asked who would run Venezuela, Trump said, “largely the people behind me,” pointing to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “They’re going to be a team that’s working with Venezuela to make sure it’s working right,” he said.

The vagueness of what happens next recalls the 2003 U.S. takeover of Iraq after the invasion ousting Saddam Hussein. Trump initially supported the Iraq operation, before saying he was against it as it stretched into a yearslong battle with disaffected Iraqis, gave rise to the Islamic State, and left thousands of American troops dead before the formal U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

Trump made no commitment to María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, or to Edmundo González, whom the United States and others recognized as the legitimate president after an election last year that Maduro was widely believed to have stolen. Rubio, he said, had spoken by phone with Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who “said ‘we’ll do whatever you need.’ I think she was quite gracious.”

Trump said Rodríguez had been sworn in as interim president, although she told Venezuela’s state television Saturday night that “There is only one president here, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”

The 20th century was marked with numerous U.S. military interventions and occupations in Central America and the Caribbean, but Saturday’s assault on Venezuela was Washington’s first direct and openly acknowledged military strike in history against a South American government. A strategic gamble with an unpredictable outcome in a deeply divided region, it dramatically alters the security dynamic across the continent.

In a flash, to both American foe and ally alike, the strikes have made the threat of U.S. military power indisputably real.

“This is one of the most dramatic moments in modern South America history,” said Oliver Stuenkel, an analyst of international affairs at the Brazilian university, the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “The United States now represents the biggest security threat for the simple fact that it just militarily attacked a South American country with an unclear rationale.”

Others were more direct. “For most Latin Americans, it’s insulting,” said a senior South American diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to draw Trump’s ire to his own country.

“Of course we understand that the might of the United States is that it can intervene in any Latin American countries in any way they want,” the diplomat said. “But this will lead to complete destruction of any kind of international law, and to a growing antipathy toward the United States” throughout the Western Hemisphere.

By Saturday morning, reaction to the strikes was already breaking along ideological lines in a region deeply polarized over security, crime, and corruption. Many on the right cheered the intervention, calling the removal of the self-described socialist Latin American strongman an advancement for liberty and a blow against drug trafficking.

Argentine President Javier Milei, whose government has received a $20 billion currency swap from the United States to stabilize his country’s troubled economy, lauded the strikes. So did Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa Azin, who has allied himself with Trump and offered to reopen a U.S. air base closed by one of his predecessors.

“For all narco-Chavista criminals, your time has come,” Noboa wrote on social media, referring to Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. “Your structure will end up falling across the entire continent.”

Those on the left decried what they called an illegal act of military aggression. Few came directly to the defense of Maduro, who had been left increasingly isolated as his authoritarian and illiberal practices have bankrupted Venezuela, unleashed a refugee crisis, and given drug traffickers increasingly free rein. But they said the unilateral strikes and his removal set a new and dangerous precedent for the region.

“The bombing of Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president crosses an unacceptable line,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said. “The action recalls the worst moments of interference in Latin American and Caribbean politics and threatens the regional preservation as a zone of peace.”

Some analysts, however, said it would be a mistake to interpret the strikes as the continuation of U.S. military actions in other Latin American nations, whether the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Guatemala’s government in 1954, the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, or the 1989 capture of Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega following a 25,000-troop invasion.

“This is not going to be a unified Latin American rejection of the action, like you may have seen in the ‘60s or the ‘70s,” when interventions were often influenced by the Cold War, said Eric Farnsworth, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “This is happening in a divided region, where nobody wanted this to happen, but where many recognized that there was no alternative to this unless you were ready to live with Maduro forever.”

Several governments and leaders in the region already have an affinity with the Trump administration — ties the White House has sought to expand and exploit over the past year.

The Trump administration has solidified relations with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who accepted millions of dollars to imprison U.S. deportees and whom Trump called a “great friend” and “one hell of a president.” It has promised new trade and security cooperation with Ecuador and Paraguay, whose leaders are also Trump admirers. And it threw an economic lifeline to Milei, whom U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called a “beacon” for South America.

But few disagreed over the significance of the strikes. For decades, the United States has focused its military might elsewhere, in theaters much further away. The attacks have returned Washington to a policy of unabashed interventionism in the region.

“The reaction in the rest of Latin America will be mixed between euphoria, anger, and fear,” said Brian Winter, an analyst with the Americas Society and Council of the Americas.

Those in the region who condemn the strikes — most notably Lula, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Colombian President Gustavo Petro — will have to watch their backs. While Trump last year had what he called a productive meeting with Lula, he repeated at the news conference an earlier warning that Petro, whose country is a major producer of cocaine, had better “watch his ass.”

In the case of Mexico, “the fact of the matter is that large swaths of the country are under the control of narco-terror organizations,” a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules imposed by the White House.

“This is not a president that just talks,” the official said. “He will take action eventually. … I think the president always retains the option to take action against threats to our national security.’’

While Petro has called Trump a “murderer” for U.S. military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, it’s unlikely that either Lula or Sheinbaum will want to risk a lengthy diplomatic dispute with the White House, said Matias Spektor, a Brazilian political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Referring to Cuba, which has depended on Venezuela for energy supplies and economic and security backing, Rubio said at the news conference Saturday, “If I lived in Havana now and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Venezuelan oil, he said, would not be allowed to go there.

Since he began ratcheting up public threats against Maduro last summer, Trump has offered an evolving list of charges to justify his removal through exile or force, from allowing China, Russia, and Iran to gain a toehold in the hemisphere, to illegal U.S. immigrants that he charged Maduro had released from Venezuelan prisons and “insane asylums,” while asserting Venezuelan “terrorist” drug gangs were engaged in “armed conflict” with the United States.

Most recently, he has charged that Venezuela “stole” oil and land belonging to the United States when it, like many other countries, nationalized its petroleum resources decades ago.

In his news conference, Trump said he now plans to take back those assets. Asked how long he planned to run Venezuela, Trump said, “I’d like to do it quickly, but it takes a period of time.”