O ne might think the Secret Service are top-line security experts who uphold the highest professional standards in their work.
They are not. We have known this for years. The questions that are arising about why the shooter at Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally wasn’t stopped before firing on the former president Saturday is sure to put more scrutiny on the agency in the coming days. And it will hardly be the first time.
In 2012, the federal government released a 229-page list of allegations against Secret Service agents going back to 2004. They included “involvement with prostitutes, leaking sensitive information, publishing pornography, sexual assault, illegal wiretaps, improper use of weapons and drunken behaviour,” the Guardian reported at the time. The list was heavily redacted, and it was not clear how many of the allegations were true.
That list came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request after the Secret Service prostitution scandal that we know was true, in which agents brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms during then-president Barack Obama’s trip to Colombia. They were also out late partying and drinking hours before needing to report to work protecting the president.
The Colombia scandal was a major news story at the time and attracted significant attention from Congress. It also attracted more attention from the press, which has reported on numerous other Secret Service failures and misconduct over the years, such as:
A 2014 panel of independent experts, commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, made 19 recommendations to improve the Secret Service. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found that six of the recommendations were still not fully implemented.
One of the recommendations was that agents on the presidential and vice-presidential protection details should spend 25 percent of their time in training. The Secret Service bargained that down to 12 percent, saying 25 percent was not feasible given staff levels. The GAO found that time actually spent in training never exceeded 7.5 percent between 2015 and 2020.
The 2014 panel recommended a new White House fence. The Secret Service did not begin construction on the fence until 2019. It was not scheduled to be completed until 2023.
The GAO also found that the agency was consistently understaffed. That included special agents, who protect the president and other individuals, and uniformed officers, who protect the White House grounds, the vice president’s residence, the Treasury, and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. The federal government spends $6 trillion a year and somehow can’t manage to hire enough people to protect the president and sensitive sites in the capital city.
Secret Service incompetence spreads to other areas as well. A 2016 Homeland Security inspector general’s report found that the agency “has not consistently made IT management a priority” and had outdated and unsecure IT practices. The inspector general found that of the 45 employees who accessed Chaffetz’s personal information, only four would have ever had a legitimate business need to access it. Lax IT security was previously addressed by the inspector general in 2011 and 2013.
A 2018 GAO report found that the Secret Service’s IT practices were still insufficient and that the problem was pointed out as early as 2008 in a National Security Agency audit. The agency had not implemented many workforce practices that would have improved IT security. A 2022 GAO report found that the Secret Service had fallen behind implementing new government-wide cybersecurity standards announced in 2021.
The Secret Service has a track record of failures and misconduct. It should not be viewed as it is sometimes portrayed in movies, as a crack squad of near-superhumans. It should be viewed for what it is: part of the federal bureaucracy, in need of serious questioning and accountability from taxpayers and their elected representatives.