They were not at the White House.

the detail that protects the White House itself is probably understaffed. Hence, the ability for intruders to break in the WH.

I did not articulate very well.

you couldn't just move money around to make sure one program was kept whole.

that was the madness of the sequestration.

Funds cannot be moved between sub agencies without "reprogramming", which usually requires congressional approval. Each agency got hacked by some fixed percentage and therefore each sub agency. If it sounds dumb, remember that sequestration only came about because congress was too incompetent to fund the agencies right in the first place.

The U.S. Secret Service has two distinct areas of responsibility:

Financial Crimes, covering missions such as prevention and investigation of counterfeiting of U.S. currency and U.S. treasury securities, and investigation of major fraud.
Protection, which entails ensuring the safety of current and former national leaders and their families, such as the President, past presidents, vice presidents, presidential candidates, visiting heads of state, and foreign embassies (per an agreement with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) Office of Foreign Missions (OFM), etc.)
The Secret Service's initial responsibility was to investigate counterfeiting of U.S. currency, which was rampant following the U.S. Civil War.

If only we had a functioning Congress.

Departments and Agencies for most of the sequester couldn't simply allocate the cuts by eliminating one unpopular or one or two less needed programs.

That's not how it worked.

The agents that were there apparently didn't do what they supposed to do.

That's why Obama agreed to Boehner's sequestration plan because allegedly, nobody would be stupid enough to go along with sequestration.

Then the teabaggers proved they were just stupid enough to walk down that stupid road.

And they did it stupidly.