Secret Service has investigated 10,000 threats this year so far

U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran.

With the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner on tap for this weekend in the nation's capital, officials from the Secret Service spoke to the media about preparations for the event and the overall increased threat environment agents have been facing so far in 2026, leading the organization's director to say the current threat environment in the U.S. is the worst he's ever seen.

Through mid-July, the Secret Service has opened 10,000 investigations into threats made against its protectees, a 40% increase year over year. "The numbers are numbers that this agency and certainly I have never seen in my 24-year career," Sean Curran, director of the U.S. Secret Service said at a press conference this week. "The environment has become very volatile, and that's just across the board," Curran added, saying, "The threat picture and environment is as large as I've ever seen it."

All categories of threats -- those made online, threats from lone wolf actors, those from people harboring ideological grievances, threats emanating from outside the country, as well as threats made by mentally unstable people -- are up this year, according to CBS News. 

The Secret Service is bracing for the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel coming up Friday night in Washington, D.C. The dinner was postponed after Secret Service agents and other officials stopped a man with a shotgun who tried to storm the event in an alleged attempt to assassinate President Trump and as many of his Cabinet members as possible in late April. The incident was the third assassination attempt against Trump in less than two years.  

Cole Tomas Allen of California was seen on surveillance footage charging past metal detectors, shotgun in hands, before being shot at by Secret Service agents, who managed to subdue him before he could make it inside the banquet hall where the event was set to be held. Curran at the time said a Secret Service agent had been shot by Allen. Allen is awaiting trial after being charged with attempting to assassinate the President of the United States. The event was called off that evening, but Trump vowed that it would be rescheduled. 

Faced with questions about whether Secret Service procedures in April were effective at the Washington Hilton, Curran argued that the security measures worked, since the suspect never made it into the close vicinity of his targets. "We're talking almost 120 yards from magnetometers to the podium," Curran said. "That's over a football field."

"We do expect bad people to show up," Curran told reporters. "It's just a reality of where we are." And he said the metal detectors are a logical place for bad actors to attempt threatening behavior. "We do expect things to happen at the magnetometers, unfortunately, but that's why they are there. And that's where it happened, and that's where it ended. So it did work. The system worked."

Below, watch a clip of Curran answering a question on how the Secret Service goes about defining its security perimeter, and watch the full press conference here.