Secret Service morale strained by Vances’ last-minute travel demands, report says

Vice President J.D. Vance’s Secret Service detail is voicing frustration over a pattern of last-minute, costly travel requests from the vice president and his family, according to a report this week.

Agents grew unhappy last Thursday while preparing to accompany Mr. Vance’s young son aboard Marine Two, the military helicopter that carries the vice president, so the boy could attend a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews. That flight was canceled last minute because of severe thunderstorms and high winds in the Washington region, according to the reporting.

After the report was published, Mr. Vance’s office told reporters that future trips to the golf lesson would be made by SUV rather than helicopter, according to people familiar with the matter. The office did not comment further.

There is no formal Secret Service policy barring a vice president’s child from riding a government helicopter to a local event, but current and former supervisors cited in the report said they knew of no precedent for such a request, according to the reporting. Prior vice presidents, they said, typically had agents drive their children locally in SUVs rather than deploy military aircraft for their convenience.

Operating the helicopter costs taxpayers between $16,000 and $24,600 per hour, based on 2022 Defense Department budget estimates.

“Pence and Harris never pulled anything like that,” one person familiar with the planned trip told the outlet.

The golf-lesson flight was cited in the report as one example of a broader pattern described by anonymous sources, who said the detail has grown fatigued by frequent unscheduled travel and has, at times, had to cancel days off on short notice. Those same sources said the Vances, who have three children ages 9, 6 and 4, have taken multiple last-minute helicopter trips to the Middleburg, Virginia, area while house-hunting for their growing family — a claim that, like the broader morale complaints, rests solely on anonymous sourcing in the report and has not been independently corroborated. Second lady Usha Vance is expecting the couple’s fourth child later this month. The Vances are the first vice-presidential family with young children to live at the Naval Observatory since Al Gore’s family more than 25 years ago.

Sources quoted in the report said the frequency of unscheduled trips — known inside the Secret Service as “off the record,” or OTR, movements — has worn on the detail, forcing agents to scramble to build new security plans with little notice. “They don’t stick to their schedules,” one person said of the family, according to the report.

The reported frustration has also produced an unofficial tradition common to protective details: custom coins and stickers, featuring a bobcat’s head and the phrase “Bobcat OTR Survivors Club,” a play on Mr. Vance’s Secret Service code name. According to the report, the name “Bobcat” reflects two institutions tied to Mr. Vance’s upbringing: Ohio University, located in the state where he was raised, and Breathitt County High School in Jackson, Kentucky, where he spent time with his grandmother — an experience recounted in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Both schools use the bobcat as their mascot.

The vice president’s office defended the agents assigned to the family in a statement: “The Vances are grateful to the men and women of the U.S. Secret Service who serve our country with distinction.”

Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn also issued a statement emphasizing that agents who join a protective detail understand the job requires “constant flexibility.”

An administration official familiar with Mr. Vance’s travel acknowledged last-minute changes occur but said that is “simply the nature of the vice president’s job,” adding that most past vice presidents did not have young children and that the detail is adjusting to a new kind of protective mandate.