s/o "Bernie suspend your campaign! You're costing us money!"

Notice Sullivan isn’t saying the Secret Service is spending $38,000 per candidate in addition to what they would spend anyway. He’s only saying it’s what they spent per candidate. This, one can assume, includes fixed costs, like labor and infrastructure. Clearly, protecting Sanders also has other costs above fixed ones—like overtime, per diems, travel—but without any context or knowledge of what the $38,000 is in reference to, it’s a totally useless number. Wagner is taking a one-off McStat without explaining how it was arrived at, and using it to mean something much more specific and consequential.

The sleight-of-hand comes from taking a specific budget item and assuming that if it wasn’t there, the costs associated with it would disappear rather than be displaced. Wagner does this by saying “protection can cost taxpayers more than $38,000 a day,” which gives the reader the impression that if Sanders dropped out, “taxpayers” would magically get back $38,000.

Does anyone think the Secret Service is going to fire the exact number of agents assigned to Sanders the day he drops out? Does anyone think the additional vehicles and equipment needed will quickly be pawned off and the money transferred over to Johnny Taxpayer? Does anyone repeating this talking point think that if the Sanders campaign had ended one week ago the US federal government would somehow be $166,000 richer?

Of course not, because anyone with a passing understanding of how federal budgets work knows that budgets are based on approximates, not line items picked on an as-needed basis. So, even if the claim is true as such—even if the $38,000 is in reference to monies needed beyond the Secret Service’s normal course of operation—it still doesn’t make any sense. Until the Secret Services asks Congress for additional funds, there is no money being added or taken from their actual budget, and thus no money being added or taken away from “the taxpayer.”