It’s time to get serious about this failure of an agency.
Our editorial today is absolutely correct: The director of the Secret Service must resign. Resignations of top leadership in a government agency after a manifest failure of that agency to perform its mission don’t happen often enough. Director Cheatle’s explanations of why the building used by Donald Trump’s attempted assassin was not properly secured would be pitiful if they didn’t betray such obvious incompetence.
We initially were told that the building was outside the security perimeter for the rally. That didn’t make sense given the building’s location. This was the Butler Farm Show, not Bryant Park. It would be a much harder job for the Secret Service to adequately secure the site if it was surrounded by a dozen skyscrapers with thousands of windows, but there were only a few short buildings that a gunman could possibly shoot from, and securing all of them should have been doable. The building was so close to Trump that it was necessary to do so.
Then we were told that there was law enforcement in the building at the time of the shooting. So it’s not as though being outside the security perimeter meant it was unsecured. Several witnesses have said they noticed someone crawling onto the roof. People don’t crawl onto roofs on 90-degree days for no reason. If law enforcement was aware of this, that should have triggered someone to tell the security close to Trump to remove Trump from the stage.
The Secret Service has said they had to work with local law enforcement, and that can be hard. It’s also normal for events like this. And the Secret Service’s job is to protect the candidates. The local law enforcement is helping them, but that is ultimately not their mission. If something goes wrong and a candidate is unsafe, that’s on the Secret Service.
If this were an isolated failure, calling for Cheatle’s resignation would be sufficient. But it is not. Instead, Congress should treat this incident as the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The Secret Service has been shambolic for years. In my article from Sunday, I made a 23-bullet-point list of Secret Service failures and misconduct going back to 2009. It was not comprehensive; there are plenty more. In 2012, a Freedom of Information Act request turned up a 229-page list of allegations against Secret Service agents going back to 2004.
The Secret Service has had seven directors since 2004. The problems are deeper than the director.
Secret Service agents have regularly been involved in scandals related to alcohol and sexual impropriety, whether visiting prostitutes or harassing employees. The Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security inspector general have found the Secret Service to be noncompliant on implementing recommendations related to physical security and cybersecurity, all before Cheatle’s tenure began.
The agency tasked with protecting perhaps the world’s foremost assassination target, the president of the United States, should be better than this. It should not be just another incompetent, blame-shifting bureaucracy. But that is what it has become.
Congress should dynamite it and start over. The prostitution scandal in Colombia in 2012, the drunk driving on the White House grounds in 2015, and the Chinese national with a malware-infected flash drive gaining access to Mar-a-Lago in 2019 were all terrible, but ultimately nobody got hurt. This time, one of the two major-party nominees for president was one flinch away from getting his head blown off on live television. It’s time to get serious about this failure of an agency.
All agencies ultimately derive their authority from Congress, which writes the laws that define their missions. The Secret Service has two missions from Congress: protection and investigation. The agency argues that those tasks complement each other. Maybe they do, or maybe some more division of labor would be beneficial. Congress should hold some hearings and do some fact-finding on that.
Other famous people hire private-security contractors to protect them. The market for private-security services has expanded rapidly around the world, and there’s likely plenty to learn from industry best practices. Maybe private contractors should become a greater part of the president’s security detail. Maybe there’s something to learn from private contractors about how the Secret Service can hire and retain top talent in the field. Congress should convene experts from the field when redesigning the agency.
Congress should insist on higher ethical and professional standards for the Secret Service. After the Colombia scandal in 2012, the Secret Service made a new agency policy that agents should not drink alcohol ten hours before work and banned agents from visiting brothels and strip clubs. Why was that not already the standard? If the agency can only be shamed into raising its standards after a scandal is publicized, Congress should write higher standards into law and require semiannual reports demonstrating that the standards are being met.
These are just some starting points for Congress to get to work. Redesigning the Secret Service to better perform its vital mission requires investigation, statute-writing, and budgeting. That’s why we have a legislature. If Congress only does a few hearings for TV and moves on, it will be missing an opportunity to correct an agency whose failures and misconduct have been putting the president’s safety at risk for years.