The Secret Service awarded a $90 million contract to an untested firm this month for a nationwide advertising campaign aimed at recruiting thousands of personnel ahead of a grueling protective schedule in 2028.
The contract appears to be the largest the Secret Service has ever awarded to an outside company for recruitment, according to former officials and government records. And it sheds light on a hiring surge the Secret Service launched late last year to ease pressure on a workforce that has been understaffed for years.
The Secret Service wants the company to deliver more than 41,000 applicants in the next year, about half of the Secret Service’s overall goal of drawing about 80,000 applicants in that period, contracting documents say.
“That’s a massive campaign for them. It’s unprecedented,” said a former senior homeland security official familiar with Secret Service operations, who requested anonymity to discuss the contract.
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Secret Service leaders have said they want to hire 4,000 new employees by 2028 to reduce burnout from an unforgiving operational tempo and make up for an attrition of experienced agents, which current and former officials say has worsened in recent months.
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that the agency’s recruitment campaign is designed to “rightsize and properly staff the agency to meet the demands of a significantly heightened mission.”
“Through the federal procurement process, the agency selected a strategic marketing partner to support recruitment goals,” he said.
The Secret Service received $1.2 billion in a sweeping reconciliation package last year, including for recruiting, retention incentives and recruitment bonuses. Still, as of May, the agency had gained fewer than 400 employees since President Donald Trump took office, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.
Secret Service leaders are racing to staff up for a 2028 security calendar that includes the presidential campaign, party conventions and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. If the agency meets its hiring goals, it would expand by about 20%, topping 10,000 employees for the first time in its history.
The $90 million award went to a small contractor, Avvy LLC, based in Fairfax, Virginia, which has never previously won a federal contract.
Avvy is on the hook for producing advertisements on television, radio and streaming services, including during prime time. Streaming videos should generate 84 million impressions in the first year, while streaming audio ads should result in 140 million, contract documents state.
The contract calls for non-skippable video ads and streaming audio ads running in Washington, D.C., and 10 states, including Texas, Florida and Georgia. The ads are supposed to target people ages 20 to 39 who are involved in law enforcement, the military, or are veterans, according to contracting documents.
Guglielmi said the contractor will support Secret Service staff in recruiting and event logistics, but the Secret Service “remains responsible for evaluating applicants and making all hiring decisions.” He added that in-person events had accelerated the hiring process, but “no qualification, suitability, security or training standards have been reduced or eliminated.”
The scope of the contract highlights how the Secret Service is casting a wide net for its candidates, only a small fraction of whom make it through the agency’s arduous hiring process.
Some former homeland security officials cautioned that such a large batch of applicants could create bottlenecks in hiring, training and onboarding. Secret Service agents train for months alongside other federal law enforcement recruits at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, before spending several more months training in eastern Maryland and then joining field offices around the country.
That will require a delicate accommodation at FLETC, which is still moving through new hires to support Trump’s surge of immigration personnel. FLETC paused training for most non-Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel for several months last year as part of that push.
“None of the demands they’ve placed on FLETC for surge training have been realistic,” a current FLETC trainer, who requested anonymity over fear of reprisal, said of the administration’s efforts.
One former Secret Service official who handled personnel matters questioned whether the agency has enough workers to vet prospective agents and send them into the field in time to make a significant difference in the 2028 workload.
“The bottom-line question is still: The company delivers 41,000 applicants, then what?” said the former official, who requested anonymity to discuss the situation. “You still can’t get them on the street. Maybe you put them in a holding pattern and work from there.”
The former official added that while the Secret Service, like other law enforcement agencies, had struggled to hire, “That doesn’t mean $90 million just to get applicants is a smart idea.”
Many applicants don’t make it through the process to begin with. Background checks and a notoriously exacting polygraph exam screen many candidates out. Recently, questions about drug usage and financial issues have disqualified some young recruits, according to people familiar with the process. Officials say the physical fitness exam has also been a growing barrier for many candidates.
The Secret Service offers recruitment bonuses of $40,000 or more, but it faces competition from other law enforcement agencies offering similar incentives and roughly equal pay for less demanding work.
“They’ve got a lot of forces conspiring against them,” the former senior homeland security official said.
The Secret Service has seen some positive signs on the hiring front. In roughly the first five months of 2025, the agency received more than 22,000 job applications, the Department of Homeland Security said at the time. That marked a more than 200% increase over the same period in 2024, officials said.
Despite that success, the number of new hires dropped off slightly in 2025 following a spike in onboarding in President Joe Biden’s last year in office, according to OPM data.
Guglielmi said the agency is on track to exceed hiring goals in fiscal 2026, with more than 1,000 new special agents and more than 400 Secret Service Police officers expected to be hired by the end of September.
The contract was awarded to Avvy on an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity basis, meaning its final terms are flexible based on what the Secret Service demands and what the contractor can deliver. Federal regulation states a preference for awarding such contracts to multiple vendors, though in this case the Secret Service chose just one.
Avvy is a “joint venture” of two other firms — Arillic and the larger DCG, both based in Virginia. They have formed a partnership under the Small Business Administration’s Mentor-Protege program, which enables larger companies to win contracts set aside for small businesses in exchange for providing support to the smaller firm.
Arillic has won a few federal contracts, according to government records, with the largest being a $3.5 million award to the Health and Human Services Department. DCG has won hundreds of contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of DCG’s contracts have involved communications and advertising for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Army’s public affairs office.
Arillic CEO Arthur Tamayo said a combination of both teams would provide the work. In a brief phone call, he said he appreciated NOTUS’ interest in the contract, noting there was “a lot of crazy stuff coming out” in the government contracting space lately including “people turning the Reflecting Pool green.” Tamayo, who is also listed as the point of contact for Avvy, did not answer detailed questions about the Secret Service contract. DCG did not respond to a request for comment.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have set significantly larger hiring targets in Trump’s current term, the Secret Service contract appears to be the largest award the department has provided to one company for recruiting or hiring since he came back into office.
In Trump’s first term, CBP signed a $300 million contract with Accenture to help it bring on 7,500 border personnel and solicited offers for a similar contract at ICE. DHS canceled the CBP contract after Accenture only successfully helped the agency hire 15 employees and aborted the ICE contract before it got off the ground.
Jeff Neal, a long-time career federal human resources official who most recently led DHS’s personnel shop, said it was not unusual for agencies to seek outside help when looking to surge hiring. But he said he didn’t think the applicant goals were realistic.
“The thing I question,” he added, “is a company that doesn’t have experience. But that appears to not be out of the ordinary for this administration.”
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