For years, the Secret Service has aimed to do more with less. Now, an independent review panel has suggested that the agency just needs to do less.
A new report on the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump says the agency has been hampered by its dual mission of protecting top political figures and investigating financial and cyber crimes. The agency should consider narrowing its focus to just protection, the report says.
It would be a dramatic shift for the storied agency, whose crime-fighting functions actually predate its duty to protect the president. And the idea quickly drew pushback from the agency’s defenders.
Critics of the proposal argue that narrowing the agency’s responsibilities could worsen its existing recruitment and retention problems. And they say the security lapses that allowed a gunman to open fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, had nothing to do with the Secret Service’s crime-fighting work.
Narrowing the agency’s role “will change the caliber, or the quality, of the new recruits because it will appeal to a different kind of person,” said Gordon Heddell, a former Department of Defense inspector general and longtime Secret Service official. “And it will not be a better person. It will not be a well-rounded person.”
But the four-person panel commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the Trump shooting concluded in a report released Thursday that the Secret Service’s policing work may be siphoning resources away from its protective mission.
“All assets should be allocated to that mission before any other tasks — including law enforcement responsibility for financial frauds, for example, or perhaps law enforcement duties entirely — are undertaken,” the report said.
A dual mission
The Secret Service is, of course, best known for protecting the president. But that’s not why it was created.
When President Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation creating the agency in 1865 — ironically, on the very day he was assassinated — it was tasked with combating counterfeiting, a huge problem as the Civil War drew to a close. The agency was housed in the Treasury Department.
But after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, the agency’s remit expanded to include protecting the president. In the century since, the agency’s twin missions have solidified, and in 2003, it was transferred from the Treasury to the newly created Department of Homeland Security.
Its crime-fighting work is expansive. The Secret Service investigates identity theft, computer crimes and a wide range of financial and bank fraud. It also helps investigate missing and exploited children, and its National Threat Assessment Center works to prevent a variety of crimes, including school shootings.
The panel that evaluated how the agency handled the Trump shooting suggested that policing work could be siphoning resources away from the protective mission. The agency’s resources and operations need to be “hyperfocused” on protection, the panel wrote.
In a different part of the report, the panel — which consisted of former law enforcement and homeland security officials — recommended that agents regularly train their state and local partners.
“This effort admittedly will take time,” the report said, “which, again, may require shedding certain peripheral responsibilities like financial fraud and counterfeiting investigations, and perhaps all criminal investigative work that is not directly tethered to the protective mission.”
That idea drew quick resistance. A former senior Secret Service official, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said investigative work is always subordinate to protection.
“There are two dragons,” he said. “The investigations dragon is much smaller, and it’s never going to eat first. The protection dragon always eats first.”
“I don’t know what they’re thinking by even going down this road,” he added.
In a statement responding to the panel’s report, Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe put things less colorfully but implicitly defended the two-pronged structure. The agency is working to ensure it can fulfill its “dual integrated mission of protection and complex investigations,” Rowe said.
The agency’s defenders say the two parts of the mission support each other, rather than conflict. Crime-fighting work deepens agents’ relationships with state and local police and sharpens the skills they need to guard their protectees, they say.
The agency is known worldwide for the stone-faced, dark-suited men with ear pieces who hover around the president. But the agents see themselves differently, according to Jeffrey Robinson, who helped former agent Joseph Petro write his autobiography.
“They’re not bodyguards — they get very upset if you call them bodyguards,” Robinson said. “Protection is not body-guarding. Protection is making sure the incident doesn’t happen. And that requires police work.”
And that work is varied: In the past year, the Justice Department has thanked the Secret Service for help on a variety of cases, including prosecutions related to cryptocurrency investment scams, theft of SNAP benefits, and health care kickback schemes. Secret Service agents at its field offices around the country regularly work on task forces with state and local partners, supporting criminal investigations. At its best, that collaboration builds relationships that might not otherwise exist — and simplifies the process of getting support from those partners when the president is in town.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who commissioned the report, has yet to weigh in on the idea of narrowing the Secret Service’s mission. He said simply that he would consider the panel’s recommendations. A White House spokesperson said the administration will “carefully review both the findings and recommendations” from the report. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The former senior agency official, meanwhile, conceded that the Butler shooting was a sign something is wrong — but said trying to excise the agency’s criminal work would be a non sequitur.
“It’s sort of like recommending a cosmetic procedure for a broken bone,” he said. “That has nothing to do with it.”
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