When the Secret Service was placed under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the idea seemed to make sense.
The service began its life way back in 1865 as a small bureau of the Treasury Department charged with stamping out widespread post-Civil War counterfeiting.
Over the next 100 years or so, the service morphed into the elite protective service we know today, an image glamorized by Hollywood as a force of black-suited, earpiece-wearing, highly trained bodyguards willing to take a bullet for the president.
But instead of raising the fortunes of the presidential protectors, as a part of the DHS, the service found itself a tiny fish in a giant pond, swallowed by an agency responsible for everything from border and airport security to immigration enforcement, plus the entire Coast Guard.
In the scramble for resources within the department, the Secret Service found itself relegated to table scraps.
The result was two decades of slow decline, marked by increased threats, a burgeoning list of protectees, longer hours, fewer agents, obsolete technology, substandard training facilities, and not surprisingly, plunging morale.
“At the James J. Rowley Training Center, outside Washington in Laurel, Md., roofs leak and plumbing systems break,” the New York Times reported in an October exposé. “The basement room where agents are trained to fight is often off-limits after heavy rain because it floods.”
It turns out that some of the agents protecting the White House have never set foot inside, and when Congress balked at funding a mock-up for training years ago, the agency improvised by using an Atlanta movie set that filmmaker Tyler Perry built.
By July 13, when a would-be assassin’s bullet came within a whisker of mortally wounding former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the steady exodus of burned-out Secret Service agents had left the force running on fumes, ill-equipped, overstretched, and undermanned.
The atavistic response from lawmakers, aghast at the embarrassing lapses in security that led to the terrifyingly close call, was to talk about funneling more federal funds to the beleaguered service.
While more resources are sorely needed, the acting head of the agency, Ronald Rowe, was quick to push back on the idea of throwing money at the problem.
“You can’t just give me money and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to make sure that everybody gets overtime,’ because the men and women of the Secret Service right now — we are redlining them,” Rowe said.
The travails at the Secret Service are compounded by its parsimonious budget, but its problems run far deeper.
“What has become clear to me is that we need a shift in paradigm in how we conduct our operations,” Rowe said a week after the Butler shooting.
The list of people whom the agency is tasked with keeping safe has been creeping up for years — in part because of the growing threat from terrorism, foreign and domestic.
Beginning during the Obama administration and accelerating when former President Donald Trump took office with his adult children and young grandchildren, the list of protectees as designated by the president ballooned from 26 in 2015 to 59 in 2021.
“There was a great deal of international travel, particularly by [Trump’s] adult children,” said Eric Lipton, the author of the New York Times story. “They were a very demanding family to follow, and that put more work on the Secret Service. It was perhaps the greatest demand in modern times.”
To deal with the shortage of experienced agents, the service embarked on a solution that, like many disastrous plans, seemed like a good idea at the time.
Fed up with being overworked and underappreciated, veteran agents who’d put in at least 20 years, began voting with their feet, collecting their pensions, and retiring.
To lure them back the agency offered a sweet deal: Keep your pension and be rehired at your old salary.
The unintended but foreseeable consequence was that it created a perverse incentive for more agents to retire to cash in on the double-dipping boondoggle.
Plus, as the New York Times discovered, when retirees did return, they often weren’t much help.
“They knew a bunch of former friends who were now their bosses, and they were giving them desk jobs pretty far away from the task of protecting the president or other protectees,” Lipton said. “One agent saw one of these rehired annuitants painting the wall of the Miami field office and couldn’t believe that this was like the highest paid painter in the United States government.”
Since July, there have been four separate investigations into the factors behind the service’s failure to provide Trump with the expected “zero-fail protection” standard, including by a Senate committee, a House task force, the service itself, and an independent outside panel.
All agree on the proximate cause of the litany of shortcomings exposed by the events at Butler: the failure to adequately plan, secure the site, clear the roof where the gunman had a clear shot at Trump, have aerial coverage from a drone, and even have radios that talked to each other.
The failures all led to the same damning conclusion. “At the end of the day,” said Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), chairman of the bipartisan House task force. “This all could have been prevented.”
But the Independent Review Panel Report, released Oct. 17, also identified what it called “deep flaws in the Secret Service, including some that appear to be systemic or cultural.”
The panel, headed by former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, cited “corrosive cultural attitudes regarding resourcing and ‘doing more with less.’”
In the gallows humor of front-line Secret Service agents, this is cynically referred to as a policy of “You ride your horse until it dies, and then you eat it.”
Notably, the reports call for wholesale housecleaning at the hidebound agency by installing “a new leadership team with significant experience outside the Service.”
“The Service has been quite insular,” Napolitano said. “And bringing outside leadership allows them to bring in ideas and practices from the private sector that they may not have been using up to now.”
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“There’s plenty of talent out in the private sector,” Napolitano said at a news conference, during which she suggested that “very senior, successful Secret Service agents who retired or law enforcement chiefs who retired” might be a good fit.
“The idea here is to have fresh thinking, both about tactics and techniques but also culture because we believe that culture is a matter of leadership,” she said. “They need a fresh start across the board.”