End the Secret Service

In 2014, a mentally unstable man jumped over the White House fence, overpowered an armed female Secret Service agent, and made it to the East Room before an off-duty agent about to leave for the night finally took him down. The 2014 incident led to the resignation of the Secret Service’s first female director who had emphasized diversity over effectiveness.

A year earlier, Barack Obama had appointed Julia Pierson (pictured above) and the move had been hailed as a milestone for diversity that would “change the culture” of the excessively male organization. Pierson launched diversity initiatives to recruit and promote women and minority personnel.

“Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own,” Obama claimed when picking Pierson.

A year later he had accepted her resignation because she had failed to keep his family safe.

But the diversity initiatives continued with the number of female agents rising from 10% in 2013 to over 25% today. Along with that there has been a massive turnover in personnel.

During the Biden administration, a sizable percentage of the Secret Service left. In 2022 and 2023 alone, 1,400 of the 7,800 personnel resigned. This was the largest departure in decades and it took place on the watch of Kimberly Cheatle who returned to Julia’s pursuit of diversity.

There had been a similar outflow of personnel during the first years of the Obama administration, but this time the outgoing agents were replaced by a new body of mostly inexperienced DEI hires.

The recently submitted Secret Service report revealed that “approximately 60 percent of the Secret Service’s law enforcement personnel have less than 10 years of experience with the agency, with approximately 30 percent having less than five years of experience.”

Like most federal agencies, the Secret Service is once again blaming its failures on not having enough money and not enough manpower while once again demanding a mockup model of the White House to train in. The Secret Service has a $3 billion budget, its manpower and money problems are self-inflicted and its failings in Butler had nothing to do with a White House set.

The Secret Service’s pursuit of DEI makes it hard to find qualified candidates when it also only has a 2% hiring approval rate. It’s hard enough finding qualified personnel willing to work long hours and risk their lives without also slotting in the Secret Service’s DEIA program to promote recruitment of LGBT, Indian, Asian, black, female and disabled recruits. The ideal disabled black lesbian Indian agent who also passes physical fitness tests and has no home life may not exist.

The Secret Service can have a ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Special Emphasis Program’ or it can staff up with qualified law enforcement and veterans who can do the job.

After the 2014 intrusion, the Secret Service promised it would quickly staff up and train new personnel. Now it turns out that many of those hires were unqualified and badly trained. The Secret Service is now asking for more money to hire more people but like most federal agencies, it’s likely to spend that money as quickly as possible and hire the unqualified.

The underlying problem is that the Secret Service has a lot of DEI hires and depends on a limited number of older white law enforcement veterans who actually know what they’re doing. With a mandatory retirement age of 57 and a program that allows personnel to retire in their fifties, collect pensions and then return to work, ludicrous salaries have become the norm.

The Secret Service salary cap is $221,145. In one survey nearly 40% of agents had hit the cap for working overtime which means that many of the Secret Service personnel are being paid more than some of the elected officials they’re protecting. After a decade of generous salaries and stressful work, they retire early and are replaced by new hires who are far less qualified.

A decade after it was supposed to be reformed, the Secret Service has only gotten worse.

In 2014, the Secret Service blamed malfunctioning radios that made it difficult to track the intruder. In 2024, the Secret Service once again blamed malfunctioning radios.

With a $3 billion annual budget and a decade worth of time, the Secret Service can’t even manage to solve a problem with its radios. Why expect it to do anything at all?

It doesn’t take a massive fortune or a lot of manpower to handle a protective detail.

When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited D.C. Secret Service “agents said they marveled at what their Israeli counterparts brought — including a portable security camera network that delivered live feeds from key spots in the prime minister’s hotel. The Secret Service has its own mobile camera system. But agents say it is so unreliable it is rarely used.”

Having a mobile security camera network is not some exotic futuristic technology, but the sort of thing a couple of teenagers could put together in a few days on a budget of thousands. It’s ridiculous that Secret Service agents were blown away by what is the bare minimum.

The Secret Service is now promising that it will deploy drones (the Trump assassin had a drone, Trump’s protective detail did not) as if this were some new advanced technology, not something teens can buy and use. And that this time it will finally get its radios working. Hopefully.

We’ve heard of all of this before.

The best way to deal with this problem isn’t to give the Secret Service more money and listen to more empty promises, but to shut it down. The Secret Service was a clunky makeshift 19th century adaptation to a rash of leftist assassins spurred on by an emotional Teddy Roosevelt in the aftermath of the murder of President William McKinley at a time when federal law enforcement options were few and the alternative was, under Lincoln, employing federal troops.

The Secret Service’s record of preventing presidential assassinations is poor to non-existent. What’s almost as bad is that it can barely function as an organization capable of doing the bare minimum, like hiring, training and deploying personnel when needed during election seasons.

A decade later, the Secret Service is still blaming the 2014 intrusion on Congress refusing to spend millions to build a mockup of the White House to train in when the issue was that the agents failed to keep an intruder from getting onto the grounds and that the armed female Secret Service agent at the door couldn’t successfully restrain him or shoot him.

None of these problems have been addressed. Or are likely to be any time soon.

The Secret Service needs to be shut down and its responsibilities transferred over within a larger federal law enforcement agency that can ‘float’ staff more effectively to avoid maintaining a large overpaid body of agents who are either too many or too few for the job at any given time.

From the Secret Service to the Capitol Police, Washington D.C. is a morass of overlapping federal security forces which are also invariably corrupt and incompetent. Consolidating them under one single police organization would be more efficient and manageable than this mess.

The Secret Service’s law enforcement responsibilities more properly belong within the FBI (which needs its own reforms) and hacking, more than ever, requires a dedicated cyberwarfare with a military component to deal with the attacks coming in from Communist China.

National security requires that presidents and key government officials should be protected by a single organization that is fit for the purpose and is integrated with federal law enforcement.

That organization should have zero DEI. It should also have working radios.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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