With Long Hours and a No-Fail Mission, the Secret Service Tries to Make Do

Over the years, whenever the U.S. Secret Service’s lack of resources has been an issue, agents invoke a tongue-in-cheek motto: We do more with less.

It’s a sentiment that might no longer apply.

Interviews with current and former Secret Service agents reveal an agency that wears down its employees, risking their sharpness. And they portray an organization that spends so much money on physical protection that there are few funds left to stay abreast of the latest law enforcement training and technologies.

An assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, has exposed weaknesses in the Secret Service’s make-do approach to security for the country’s highest elected officials, their families and visiting foreign leaders.

Kimberly Cheatle, the then-Secret Service director, told a congressional committee Monday that the shooting — which left the former president’s ear bloodied and injured three other spectators, one fatally — “is the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.” She resigned the day after the hearing.

The agency’s security lapses in Butler have spurred numerous investigations and prompted debate as to whether the Secret Service, which is operating with its largest-ever budget, has adequate resources to fulfill its critical mandate and is using its funds in the most effective manner. So far this year, according to an agency official, the Secret Service has already secured more than 7,500 sites, including the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“The Secret Service is conducting a top-to-bottom review of all of our operational security policies and procedures to see where we may need to request additional resources to bolster our protective mission,” a spokesperson for the Secret Service said in a statement to The New York Times.

The agency has come under fire for having turned down some requests for additional federal security assets for Trump’s detail, though the agency says that was not the case on July 13. The agency says it routinely uses local law enforcement officers to supplement its protective forces. While the agency has said about 100 law enforcement officers were present in Butler, it has not said how many of them were active Secret Service employees.

On Saturday, Trump declared on social media that he would continue to hold outdoor rallies.

The Secret Service currently looks after 36 protectees, down from 42 during Trump’s presidency. This year, the service, which employs more than 8,000 people, received $3.1 billion in congressional funding.

By comparison, the U.S. Marshals Service, whose 5,600 employees protect federal judges and courts and transport prisoners, received less than $2 billion. But the Secret Service’s unusual dual mandate of both protecting officials and combating financial crimes like counterfeiting makes good analogies elusive.

Polarized politics and incendiary language in this election season have raised the need for robust security for candidates and their families. After the July 13 shooting, the Secret Service bolstered protections for Trump and added Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent, to the protectee list, stretching the agency’s resources even thinner. It is a job in which mistakes can be disastrous but successes are rarely acknowledged.

Mike Matranga, a former Secret Service agent who helped protect former President Barack Obama, said he was disappointed that Cheatle did not stress the importance of resources in her comments before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

“I saw that testimony as a major opportunity for her to go in there and say, ‘Listen, we’ve been severely understaffed for over a decade, and yes, you’ve given us increases in budget, but it’s not enough,’” he said.

Cheatle did say Monday that “we are still striving towards a number of 9,500 employees, approximately, in order to be able to meet future and emerging needs.”

In a recent interview on CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s responsibility to provide more funding, with the White House’s involvement. “The buck ultimately stops in the Oval Office,” he said.

But a Homeland Security official said the agency has limited flexibility to provide additional resources beyond what it is approved to allot to the Secret Service.

Current and former Secret Service agents who worked both in the agency’s dozens of field offices and at the White House described a culture of workaholism, driven by a single-minded focus to protect their charges, but one that risked burnout.

Former agents recalled working for weeks on end, sometimes in foreign countries, often with frequent and unexpected extensions to their travel schedules. To keep their clothes fresh, they steamed their uniforms on hotel ironing boards in the middle of the night or ran to Walmart for extra underwear. Their homes and pets were watched by neighbors.

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that while the Secret Service had streamlined some of its hiring efforts and taken steps toward improving work-life balance for employees, additional improvement was needed in staffing and retention. And a law enacted in February to allow for extra overtime pay recommended that the Secret Service hire additional personnel to reduce overtime in the future. The starting base pay is about $50,000.

The Secret Service’s work grew more complex in the Trump administration, which drew in a large first family spread out over multiple states. The service secured tens of millions of dollars to outfit Trump Tower in New York City for agency use, only to find that the president spent much of his time away from Washington in Florida and New Jersey.

And foreign dignitary visits, which the service is also assigned to handle, can sometimes occur with little advance warning, prompting a last-minute scramble.

As an agent in the New York field office in the late 2000s, “we’d get a call on Friday night from American Airlines saying, ‘Just so you know, the Bahamian prime minister just boarded a flight to New York. Is anyone aware of that?’” remembered Jonathan Wackrow, who left the agency in 2014.

Current and former employees also noted that for a variety of reasons, including federal pay caps on the Secret Service, agents were not always able to collect overtime pay. Congress has passed temporary extensions to waive the caps.

Many former agents said that despite the stress, they loved the work.

But “because there’s not a deep bench,” said Donald Mihalek, who worked for the service for two decades before retiring in 2019, “you’re going to the same pool every time, which then, you’re wearing out your people.”

A 2023 survey of government employees by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service on the best places to work in government rated the Secret Service No. 413 out of 459 agencies.

Fighting exhaustion and demoralization to stay sharp, said former agents, was part of the job. The mentality of the typical Secret Service agent, said Wackrow, is that “no matter what the obstacles are intrinsically — because of manpower and staffing and resources — they still never waver on the focus of the mission.”

The time-intensive nature of the dual responsibilities — protecting charges and investigating financial fraud — means the vast majority of the service’s funding gets chewed up by personnel costs.

Last year, 88% of the agency’s funding went to operations and support, including protection and field operations, according to budget documents. That left just $84 million for procurement, construction and other improvements and $4 million for research and development, including weapons testing and innovations in information technology.

Both independent and congressional reviews over the years have asked for a more clearly defined budget. Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, whose House committee published a scathing report on the service in 2015, said in an interview that he was astonished when agency leaders could not estimate for him the annual cost of protecting a president.

But agents say the financial murkiness is unavoidable. Guarding the president on a single foreign trip can cost millions of dollars, estimated one. If a protectee traveling abroad lodges at a costly Four Seasons hotel, so must the Secret Service team.

The agency has been unable to win funding for even some top priorities. It has never secured the $8 million or more it would need to build a White House replica on the service’s Beltsville, Maryland, training grounds — despite pushing for nearly a decade to avoid having their agents train on an empty field.

“You wouldn’t ask your Super Bowl champs to go out and train in a parking lot,” said Cheatle, who tried to renew the push for a replica, in an interview in May.

Instead, dozens of agents settled for a series of visits to movie producer Tyler Perry’s studio in Atlanta, which is a model of the White House. They even ran a training exercise there, an agency official said.

One gap in Secret Service resources was laid bare when Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was found to have used a drone to surveil the July 13 rally site. But the Federal Aviation Administration has said a drone authorization for the Secret Service — which would have been required — was never sought.

Several agents interviewed said that with so much time and energy being poured into staffing the protective mission, areas like drone oversight and weapons innovation were easily overlooked. Wackrow said that to his knowledge, drones were used only at huge national events like presidential inauguration parades.

Simply evolving the agency’s long gun program to focus on Armalite Rifles, or AR, models, he recalled, took about a decade. AR-style guns have become the weapon of choice for mass shooters.

Some former agents shrugged off the equipment shortages, saying the importance of their mission was enough to keep them going.

“Yes, there were times when we didn’t have exactly what we needed,” recalled Beth Celestini, who also worked on Obama’s detail before retiring in 2021. “We could turn around and get 1,000 new people, or 5,000 new people, and get unlimited funds, but it’s still going to take time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .