Wednesday, August 03, 2011
The Secret Service pays (quite literally) for the duty of protecting Vice President Joe Biden.
Whenever Biden returns to his waterfront home in Wilmington, Delaware, Secret Service agents stay in a cottage on the property—and pay $2,200 a month in rent.
The rate is the same that the previous renter paid Biden for using the cottage.
To date, the vice president has collected more than $13,000 from the agency charged with protecting him and his family, and he may end up earning about $66,000 by the time the government contract authorizing the cottage rental expires in the fall of 2013.
When asked if the Secret Service pays rent to other people it protects, a spokesman dodged the question and reiterated that the Biden property is a rental, “so we pay rent there.”
Taxpayer watchdog groups have questioned the arrangement.
“He should be afforded every single protection available to him and his family, as should every vice president and president,” Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste, told The Washington Times. “But this arrangement seems bizarre to me.”
Paige added: “You’d think the vice president, who shepherded the deficit committee, would think twice about charging the Secret Service rent. Why would he need the money? I don’t get it.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Biden Collects Rent from Secret Service (by Jim McElhatton, Washington Times)
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