“Unfortunately, the Secret Service has ignored recommended reforms despite past investigations into its failures,” a former House Oversight Committee investigative staffer warns in a statement addressing the agency’s failure to protect former President Donald Trump from a would-be assassin's bullet on Saturday.

While an Oversight Committee staffer, Empower President Tristan Leavitt worked with whistleblowers from the U.S. Secret Service to break news of high-profile misconduct and security breaches. “Yesterday’s attempted assassination of former President Trump exposed obvious security failures,” Leavitt said in a statement after the former president was shot by a would-be assassin.

In 2015, Leavitt was part of a congressional investigation that recommended solutions for past Secret Service security failures – but, several of those recommendations were either ignored or improperly implemented, Leavitt says:

“Unfortunately, the Secret Service has ignored recommended reforms despite past investigations into its failures, including a 2014 independent commission. I helped lead a bipartisan year-long congressional investigation in 2015 that produced a 200-page Committee report, but our recommendations were never properly implemented.”

The report, “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis,” cites “systemic problems within the agency”:

“The American public’s respect for the agency diminished following the April 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, which attracted significant media attention and exposed systemic problems within the agency.

“Since then, several incidents have made it abundantly clear that USSS is in crisis. The agency’s weaknesses have been exposed by a series of security failures at the White House, during presidential visits, and at the residences of other officials, including Vice President Biden and former presidents of the United States.”

“The Committee also found that at times agency leaders have provided incomplete and inaccurate information to Congress,” the report notes – a problem that continues to this day, as the agency stonewalls demands by members of Congress for answers about the agency’s failure to prevent Trump from being shot.

“Any after-action review should listen directly to the agents on the front lines, not just the leaders who have resisted meaningful reforms and have every reason to cover their own mistakes,” Leavitt says in his statement released after Saturday’s assassination attempt.

“Serious deficiencies” within the Secret Service identified in the 2015 report that still plague the agency today include staffing problems:

Long before the Secret Service began diluting the quality of its employees by shifting its recruitment priorities from merit to diversity in recent years, the decade-old report warned of “an extraordinarily inefficient hiring process which overburdens USSS with low-quality applicants.”

Other Secret Service failures cited in the report, which still resonate today, include: