The decline of the Secret Service

Good day all. Yesterday I wrote a post on the Secret Service allowing untrained and unvetted drivers into the Presidential motorcade. Another story came out regarding the slow decline of the Secret Service’s capabilities over the last 14 years.

The Secret Service has been around for almost 150 years. Originally they were set up to catch counterfeiters. Later on it took on the role of handling domestic intelligence and counterintelligence operations. (This was later moved to the FBI) In 1902 the Secret Service took on the role it is best known for, protecting the President of the United States.

For decades they did this role very well, although not perfectly. They lost President Kennedy in 1963 and nearly lost Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Secret Service learned from both incidents and worked to improve themselves. However, after the 9/11 attack, things changed for the Secret Service. Since then, they have slowly declined in abilities and training, with several scandals over the last few years. Here are some of the details from the Washington Post:

The Secret Service began struggling to carry out its most basic duties after Congress and the George W. Bush administration expanded the elite law enforcement agency’s mission in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. According to government documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials, the recent string of security lapses at the White House resulted from a combination of tight budgets, bureaucratic battles and rapidly growing demands on the agency that have persisted through the Bush and Obama administrations in the 13 years since the attacks. At the same time, the Secret Service was hit by a wave of early retirements that eliminated a generation of experienced staff members and left the agency in a weakened state just as its duties were growing.

The changes to the Secret Service and its mission were, like so many other really bad ideas after 9/11, rammed thorough with little thought as to the ramifications.

The agency assumed new responsibilities monitoring crowds at an increasing number of major sporting events and other large gatherings seen as potential targets for terrorists. A new anti-terrorism law gave the agency a leading role in tracking cyberthreats against U.S. financial systems. And Bush expanded the circle of people granted round-the-clock protection to include the president’s and vice president’s extended family and some White House aides — an expansion that has been largely maintained under President Obama.

Another issue was the transfer of the Secret Service from the Treasury Department over to that screwed up bureaucratic mess known as the Department of Homeland Security.

Where the Secret Service had been a gem of the Treasury Department for more than a century, its post-9/11 transfer to the sprawling new Department of Homeland Security suddenly forced it to compete for money and attention with bigger and higher-profile agencies focused on immigration and airport security.

In case the morons running DHS didn’t notice, the first word in the name of the Secret Service is “Secret.” They aren’t out there blowing their own horns like the rest of the bureaucratic bunglers there. Because of this, while their responsibilities increased, their numbers and budget haven’t.

Immediately after the attacks, temporary details were mobilized for Bush’s extended family, including his grown siblings. Later, with the country at war in Afghanistan, the agency provided details for Vice President Dick Cheney’s grandchildren in addition to those for his adult daughters, Liz and Mary.

Considering what had happened, and that our intelligence was faulty, adding these people temporarily does make sense. Those vermin would have gone after the family members of Bush and Cheney if they could. However, it turned out not to be temporary at all.

With that, the standard was set. By late 2003, Secret Service details were assigned to 29 people. Currently, the agency protects 27 people, including Vice President Biden’s five grandchildren, ranging from middle-school to college age, and senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

And I’m sure the grand kids just love being followed around by men in suits and dark glasses. As to Valarie Jarrett? Everyone knows she’s the one who actually runs the government, not that mouth breathing moron Obama. Since they have increased the number of people being watched, you would have thought they would have increased the number of agents. Nope.

But resources remained largely flat, forcing agents to work longer hours and spend extended stretches on the road. For years, hard work helped keep the agency’s turmoil from showing.

The problem is, the Secret Service only numbers about 6000 people for everything. The empire builders decided they wanted their piece of the money pie to be bigger.

Inside DHS, the 6,200-member Secret Service was dwarfed by the new Transportation Security Administration and the rapidly growing U.S. Customs and Border Protection, each with more than 50,000 employees.

And what did they do with all these resources?

DHS officials were focused on addressing high-profile security concerns, and hundreds of millions of dollars were directed to anti-terrorism programs.

Which makes some sense, however protecting the President is the highest priority.

But the Secret Service’s mission did not engender the same sense of urgency, according to people familiar with internal deliberations.

So they didn’t care if Bush got plugged?

The entire focus of the nation shifted after 9/11, and all federal agencies had to adjust to the new realities,” Ridge said recently through a spokesman. “That said, the Secret Service, because of its protective mission and direct ties to the White House, never suffered from a lack of resources to carry out their critical responsibilities during my time at DHS.”

Back then, things were just getting ramped up. However, Ridge and his successors seemed more interested in building what’s becoming a police state rather then actually dealing with terrorism. That’s just my opinion of course.

Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff at the time, said he intervened several times to fight off proposed cuts to the Secret Service’s budget. But Congress and DHS officials did not always view some of the agency’s initiatives as a top priority, he said.

Chris Cummiskey, a former Obama DHS official who retired this fall, said he saw the Secret Service struggle — and suffer financially — from “organizational turmoil” stemming from its presence in DHS.

Cummiskey said the agency pushed for money in some areas — such as enhancing protective countermeasures at the White House and updating communications systems — but got far less than it sought.

“There was a competition for dollars in an increasingly finite budget environment,” he said. “All of a sudden, there was high premium placed on justification.”

Justification? How about a dead president? Between retirements and resignations due to flat out burnout, the pool of experienced agents has dropped significantly, In addition, the uniformed details, (The agents in uniform around the White House and other areas), have been stretched to the breaking point. They simply do not have the trained people to do the job. With the overwork, the lack of resources and incredibly bad management, is it any wonder that the morale of the rank and file agents is in the dumpster?

A 2013 survey of Secret Service employees found what it called a “noteworthy” distrust of senior managers among the rank and file. Nearly 1 in 4 — 587 out of 2,575 — said they believed that top managers were not held responsible for their own misconduct. And 1 in 5 said they felt management tolerated misconduct, according to the electronic survey, conducted by the DHS’s inspector general’s office.

In the last few years, we have seen people jumping the fence around the White House and in one case, the only reason one nut didn’t make it to the residence, (The area of the White House the president lives in), was the chance encounter with an agent who had just gone off duty and was heading out the door. Then we have the scandals where agents have been caught hiring prostitutes and managers who literally don’t have the brains to come in out of the rain.

Putting the Secret Service under the DHS has been an unmitigated disaster, and only through pure luck have they been able to keep someone from taking a shot at Obama. It’s time for Congress to return the Secret Service to the Treasury Department and reduce their responsibilities to what they were before 9/11. Otherwise, we will lose a president or some other person being protected by the Secret Service and more then likely, lose a number of agents as well.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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