Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump is covered by U.S. Secret Service agents at the campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, last Saturday, following shots fired by a would-be assassin.
Last Saturday, the Secret Service and local law enforcement in Butler County, Pennsylvania, failed to prevent a 20-year-old armed with an AR-15 from climbing onto a rooftop with an unobstructed view of presidential candidate Donald Trump as he spoke at a campaign rally. Before authorities took out the assassin, he got seven shots off, grazing Trump’s right ear, leaving two attendees seriously injured, and killing one, firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died while shielding his family. The shooter has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican who once donated $15 to a Democratic-aligned PAC in 2021.
The events that led to the near-death of a presidential candidate will be the subject of a House Oversight hearing next week. The committee subpoenaed Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who has said her agency is taking responsibility for the security lapse and will appear before the panel. President Biden has also called for a full independent investigation into the agency, to shed light on an array of troubling reports that have surfaced in the wake of the shooting.
CBS revealed that three officers stood inside the very building from whose roof Crooks targeted the former president, and that the Secret Service knew about an active gunman ten minutes before shots were fired, according to a briefing to lawmakers this week.
Confirmed video evidence shows snipers on another rooftop across from the gunman with a target in their crosshairs. Even if protocols didn’t allow the snipers to take out the gunman preemptively on the spot, it’s unclear why they would not have immediately notified other officials on the ground to get the president offstage.
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, numerous rally-goers spotted the gunman on the roof and yelled and pointed to nearby local law enforcement who appear to stand idle despite the warnings, based on a video showing the interaction and a BBC interview. A local cop pursued the shooter up a ladder but retreated once Crooks pointed the gun at him just before turning to fire at the president.
At the very least, the reporting so far paints a damning picture of an agency that can purchase troves of data on Americans’ locations, even from a Muslim prayer app, and yet apparently can’t fulfill the most basic function of securing a rooftop. In many ways, it calls into question the vast post-9/11 national-security apparatus consolidated under the Department of Homeland Security, armed with extensive surveillance powers that were justified in the name of keeping Americans and their representatives safe.
The hearing next week is just the latest in a series of related investigations, hearings, and independent panels that the government has convened in the past decade to try to fix a broken agency plagued by recurrent security lapses. The Trump assassination attempt may be the most dramatic, but it’s one of many close calls that have taken place on the agency’s watch going back to the Obama administration. The last time the agency was under scrutiny like this, a congressional report and panel studied the problem and made a series of recommendations in 2015 for how the agency needed to reform its practices. Based on available evidence, the Secret Service has yet to fully complete the entirety of those changes from a decade ago, spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations.
This bureaucratic inertia points to the need for a broader overhaul of the agency beyond just more hearings.
The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment to clarify the status of implementing these changes, which date back to recommendations made during the Obama presidency.
OVER THE COURSE OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, a series of scandals befell the Secret Service (USSS) and DHS by extension. In 2011, a man with a semiautomatic rifle was able to get close enough to the White House without detection to unload several rounds at the building. A few years later, in 2014, an armed intruder got over the White House fence, entered the building, and reached the East Room before the Secret Service caught up to him. In another breach, a Secret Service agent failed to do a bag check on a visitor without security clearance for a presidential event at a Los Angeles hotel, because he was watching a movie on his phone with an LAPD cop. Then the Secret Service faced a prostitution scandal in Colombia during a summit meeting there with foreign leaders.
Those are only a handful of the most high-profile incidents that led President Obama to convene an executive-level blue-ribbon Protective Mission Panel to study the issue. Later, in 2015, the House Oversight Committee followed up with a bipartisan 435-page report based on interviews, whistleblower complaints, and outside consultation, which it summed up as “An Agency in Crisis.” The report built off the panel’s findings and laid out widespread systemic issues, ranging from inadequate overtime pay to poor training, and an internal culture the report described as lacking accountability going all the way up to leaders of the agency.
The emergence of this crisis, the report determined, came to a head as the agency faced an acute staffing shortage beginning in 2011, as the number of employees dramatically declined. A high attrition rate continued in subsequent years, which strained the agency’s resources and led to more inexperienced agents on the job. During periods of turnover, remaining agents would be overburdened with too many assignments. When there were security failings, the top brass never accepted blame and failed to adapt or make changes, according to whistleblowers cited in the report.
“Systemic mismanagement at USSS has been unable to correct these shortfalls, and declining employee morale leading to attrition … many employees do not have confidence in agency leadership,” it said.
The report concluded with a set of directives for the agency: fix the attrition rate, improve training, and streamline internal processes. But the core recommendation was to fundamentally restructure the dual functions of the agency: protective duties and investigative.
Congressional investigations of this nature often come at a time of scrutiny, and their recommendations are often misinterpreted as actual changes in policy.
Most people primarily associate the Secret Service with guarding public officials from harm, but that’s actually a much more recent role that grew out of all the assassination attempts in the second half of the 20th century. Originally, the Secret Service was designated to fight counterfeit currency. After the September 11th attacks, the agency ceased to be part of the Treasury Department and was placed under the Department of Homeland Security. Officially, it became more aligned with protection of officials. But a significant portion of its time and resources still goes to a variety of criminal investigations into financial and electronic crimes.
One takeaway from the congressional report is that these other investigations were inhibiting the Secret Service from focusing its resources on protecting officials, as it was already coming up short on that basic duty.
There have been outside proposals to completely end the USSS’s investigation authority and move that work back over to the Treasury Department, but that would require additional government action or executive authority. In the meantime, the congressional report proposed that the agency should erect more of a structural barrier between its dual roles. “No peripheral investigative duties should be allowed to detract from the core aspect of USSS’s mission: protection,” it concluded.
Congressional investigations of this nature often come at a time of scrutiny, and their recommendations are often misinterpreted as actual changes in policy. Once the report is released, people assume the issue has been addressed. But once the report goes out into the world, it customarily takes years for anything to happen, with few benchmarks along the way to track implementation of new policies. The USSS congressional report is a case study for this kind of inaction.
By 2019, GAO issued an analysis concluding that the USSS was making progress but still had not completed eight of the congressional panel’s 19 major recommendations. Some of the completed ones on the checklist were the more low-hanging fruit and required less structural change; they included fortifying a new perimeter fence around the White House. The agency had yet to fully implement more important changes, such as meeting the set hours of training that Congress established to improve agents’ preparedness. The congressional report had set a high bar requiring agents, for instance, to train for 25 percent of their work hours in activities like running through simulated active-shooter scenarios.
In a follow-up report from GAO in 2022, six of the 19 recommendations still were not met, and others items had not been fully implemented. The hours of training, for example, had improved, but mostly because GAO in consultation with DHS has reduced the requirement for those training hours to 12 percent instead of 25.
But the core issue still plaguing the Secret Service is balancing the investigative and protective duties.
In a follow-up study to the congressional report, GAO in 2020 looked at USSS internal procedures and discovered that the agency’s investigations might be spreading resources thin when it came to protection. There isn’t a neat separation between investigative and protective divisions inside the agency; most officers are conducting both functions at the same time, especially during presidential campaigns when more staff is needed. When attrition rates spiked, this overlap became even more prevalent.
Of the sampling of 40 agents interviewed by GAO, over half were conducting investigations while also working on such top protective assignments as presidential campaigns. The strain on staffing was exactly the type of concern raised by the congressional report as a contributor to the agency’s breakdown. In 2018, according to the report, 37 percent of the agency’s total hours logged on protective operations were performed by personnel working out of the Office of Investigations. In 2016, a presidential year with more protective duties to execute, that number was even higher, at 45 percent.
This could be one contributing factor to the overall dysfunction on display at Saturday’s Trump rally. If those agents were conducting investigations before being pulled onto the Trump detail, they might not have been trained for those scenarios for the appropriate number of hours.
According to Noah Chauvin at the Brennan Center, who used to work at the Office of the General Counsel at DHS, it’s plausible that some of those agents were assigned from the local field office in Philadelphia. That’s in line with normal procedure. Like most field offices, that office in its day-to-day operations is primarily conducting various financial and fraud investigations. The Philadelphia office would not comment about the events of the assassination.
We do know that there was a staff shortage at the rally, which the Secret Service did not accommodate for unknown reasons, according to The Washington Post. Local law enforcement had informed the Secret Service ahead of time that they didn’t have the capacity to supply patrol cars outside the building where the shooter ultimately took up his position.
Following its years of ineptitude, last weekend’s assassination attempt reinforces the impression that the Secret Service likely needs a new organizational structure and mandate.
The impact of the assassination attempt has yet to be fully determined. It may seem like a stretch to tie the incident to future policy decisions, but Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy playbook designed to shape the next Trump administration, took a stab at this question about USSS reform.
While much of Project 2025 is anathema to progressive policy aims, one of the few points of overlap is its proposal to disband DHS. Civil liberties advocates on the left have been advocating for this for years, albeit for different reasons. Conservatives believe that the national-security apparatus which targets groups from Muslim Americans to Black Lives Matter activists has also been turned against right-wingers in recent years. In place of DHS, Project 2025 calls for a supercharged immigration enforcement agency to facilitate mass deportations—a recommendation with which, needless to say, civil libertarians and the broad left won’t be on board.
As part of the dismantling of DHS, however, Project 2025 also calls for the USSS to go under the Department of Justice, while its investigative roles would be transferred to the Treasury. These changes would “result in a significant USSS budget reduction,” though that’s mainly by shedding the investigators and shutting down several offices in the U.S. and internationally.
There would be significant obstacles to enacting this proposal, but the playbook lies in wait for a second Trump presidential term depending on the outcome in November. Minus the war on immigrants, Democrats, should they hold power, might want to redefine the Secret Service, too.
