“Agents have a certain drive,” a Secret Service agent says. “They’re all kind of wired the same; they all want to see the job get done, and they want to get it done the right way.”
But many say that the agency’s management needlessly makes the job tougher. In particular, the Secret Service’s senseless transfer policies drive agents to quit before retirement, adding to the government’s costs. This comes at a time when, because of threats from terrorists, the need for the Secret Service has never been greater.
Agents cite numerous situations where fellow agents are denied transfers to cities where their spouses work, while others are forced to transfer to those same cities. Often, the agents who want to transfer have offered to pay their own moving costs. Instead, the Secret Service pays fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars each to move agents who do not want to be transferred to those cities.
“We sign up to take a bullet, but that’s not the hardest part of the job,” Jessica Johnson, a former Secret Service agent, says. “It’s not anything that we normally face. The risk is there. But what makes the job very difficult is the mismanagement. If the Secret Service were better managed, you’d have a lot better workforce, a lot more people who don’t quit.”
Since 9/11, the private sector has been offering hefty salaries to anyone with a federal law enforcement background. Typically, former Secret Service agents sign up as vice president for security of a major corporation or start their own security firms. For those who want to remain vested to earn full government pensions, opportunities have expanded as well at other federal law enforcement agencies.
Until 1984, under a previous retirement system, Secret Service agents could not keep their pensions if they transferred to another government agency. Now they can. Agents can retire at any age after twenty-five years with the agency. They can retire at age fifty if they have served twenty years. For both government agencies and private companies, a Secret Service or FBI agent is a prize catch.
The FBI has taken steps to retain agents, while the Secret Service has not. In contrast to the Secret Service, after three years with the bureau, unless he or she chooses to go into management, an FBI agent can stay in the same city for the rest of his or her career. An agent going into management can remain in the same city for five years.
The Secret Service, on the other hand, typically transfers agents three to four times during a twenty-five-year career. An agent who enters management may move five to six times. The rationale is that agents need to acquire experience in different offices. But experience in one office does not translate into another. Decades ago, the FBI had the same policy. The bureau scrapped it because the constant moves were not necessary and resulted in many agents leaving the bureau. In turn, that led to high costs both for moving families and for training new agents to replace those who left.
Not having to transfer as often, FBI agents can better work out living arrangements with spouses. The FBI at least tries to take into account situations where a spouse must work in a particular city, sometimes addressing these as hardship cases.
Essentially, according to agents, the Secret Service moves agents around like checkers on a board without regard to their wishes. Rather than explaining the reasoning behind transfers or other policies that impinge on the agents’ personal lives, the Secret Service will typically give the high-handed response that the change is necessary because of the “needs of the service.” The exception is when an agent has “juice,” meaning connections to higher-ups, a situation that contributes to poor morale.
After two years on the Clinton detail based at the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, Johnson wanted to transfer back to California, where she grew up.
“All of a sudden, they said they can’t transfer anyone out of New York,” she says. “They said they have no one to replace me. At the same time, they’re sending out an email that says anyone, regardless of where you are in your career track, if you would like to go to Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, raise your hand and you’re there. So I write the little memo and I raise my hand. I jump up and down, and they tell me, ‘Oh, well, we can’t replace you. So you can’t go.’”
At the same time, Johnson says, friends in the Los Angeles office were sending her copies of emails they were receiving from management saying they had to leave Los Angeles to go to protective details.
“A year later when I went to my management, they said, ‘Oh, well, L.A.’s full. How about the New York field office?’” she says.
When the Secret Service finally agreed to transfer her to Los Angeles after three years in New York, “I find out that we were eleven bodies short in L.A. So how did we go from being full to being eleven bodies short in four months?”
In other cases, the Secret Service disregards situations where a spouse has a job in another city. Johnson and others describe one situation where an agent based in Los Angeles began dating a doctor in Hawaii. Eventually, they married, and the agent put in for a transfer to Hawaii, where his wife had an established medical practice.
“We have an office in Hawaii, so it’s easier for him to transfer than it is for her,” Johnson says. “But the management we had in L.A. at the time had no juice. He was told he couldn’t be transferred to Hawaii. He quit because he said his marriage was more important.”
About a month later, after he moved to Hawaii, he applied to return to the Secret Service. The head of the Hawaii office, who had juice, rehired him.
“Here you’re being told you can’t transfer, and the bottom line was, it was all about who your boss is,” Johnson says.
In another case, agent Dan Klish was issued orders to transfer to Los Angeles. His wife’s career as a radiation oncologist made it difficult for her to find a position there. Finally, she obtained a job near Denver. Klish asked for a transfer to Denver or Cheyenne and offered to pay for the move himself. That would have saved the government about seventy-five thousand dollars in moving costs. The transfer was denied. For more than two years, they lived apart, and the agent flew to Denver once or twice a month to see his wife and young daughter.
During that time, the service asked for volunteers to transfer to Denver. Approximately ten other agents were transferred to Denver, some with less seniority, at a cost to the government of seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars for each move.
“If the opening isn’t available at that moment, then the service can say, ‘Oh, sorry, that office is overstaffed. Here are your only options,’” Klish says. “Then, sure enough, while you’re still on orders to move somewhere else but haven’t moved yet, an opening in a city that would work for you comes out, and you can’t even put in for it because you’re already on orders to go elsewhere. Later, after you’ve moved, they transfer several others to that city. There is a strong bond among agents, but unless you have the right connections, the Secret Service doesn’t care about the agents.”
After eight years with the Secret Services, Klish finally quit to join another federal agency in Colorado.
Joel Mullen, an agent who was based in Washington, D.C., is married to a navy lawyer. When the navy gave her orders to transfer to San Diego, Mullen asked to transfer to the Secret Service field office there, saying the navy would pay the cost. After initially approving the transfer, headquarters blocked it, even though San Diego had openings. Mullen and his wife had started building a home near San Diego. The Secret Service told Mullen to transfer to the Los Angeles office instead.
“I commuted ninety-six miles one way from my door to the office,” Mullen says. “I did that for fourteen months. Then I left and went with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”
Besides losing an agent with ten years’ experience, the Secret Service wound up paying out $240,000 for the transfer to cover Mullen’s costs, including the decline in the value of his house in the Washington area.
Nor does the agency have an open process for listing anticipated vacancies and agents’ preferences for transfers. All are kept sec
ret. If an agent has “juice,” he or she is bumped ahead of others.
In contrast, the FBI, which has 12,500 agents, maintains online lists of requested transfers to each field office so that agents can see who is ahead of them. FBI agents say connections play no role in transfers. Because of the open lists, if the FBI did engage in such under-the-table preferential treatment, the agents would know it.
That the Secret Service’s computer program for listing transfer preferences and bidding on promotions is an antiquated DOS-based program symbolizes how much the Secret Service cares about agents’ wishes.
Resignations before retirement have increased substantially in recent years. In all, the Secret Service has 3,404 special agents. More than half their man-hours are devoted to protection of the president and other national leaders, as well as visiting foreign dignitaries. Attrition rates are increasing. As the trend accelerated, the Secret Service declined to provide full yearly figures, but the rate is roughly 5 percent a year. Turnover rates are as high as 12 percent a year in the Uniformed Division, which has 1,288 officers. More alarming, agents who have been in the service ten years say a third to half of the agents who were in their initial training class have left.
“These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job and are held in high esteem,” an agent says. “That’s what really hurts us.”
The Secret Service asked an analyst then based in Washington to study the problem of retention and the costs associated with agent turnover. She found it was an increasingly serious problem. The incremental cost to the government of training a new agent is eighty thousand dollars for the agent’s salary and the cost of equipment and travel. That excludes the fixed costs of the training facilities and the salaries of instructors.
“The higher-ups basically dismissed her findings, saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have any kind of retention problem,’” says a current agent. “They didn’t want to hear it.”
Johnson, who is now a real estate investor, describes trying to raise the issue during her exit interview.
“The supervisor who was giving me the exit interview was literally saying, ‘Tell me if there are any problems we should know about’ as he was starting to escort me out the door,” Johnson says. “I said, ‘Well, yes, I’m sure you hear this a lot,’ and I began to lay out examples of unnecessary burdens imposed on agents.”
The supervisor became defensive.
“He started going on about how the military does more, and there are civilians who sacrifice more than we do in the service,” she says. “He couldn’t even listen to what I had to say.”
In a rare move, an agent raised the issue at a meeting of Secret Service officials at the agency’s Washington field office.
“You’ve got a bunch of Generation X agents,” he said. “We’re concerned about our families; we’re concerned about our wives and our kids. Something has to change.”
Shortly after that, the agent resigned.
In recent years, agents say a dismissive, insular culture and a disregard for the need to retain agents have remained constant.
“Our leadership is in absolute denial that there’s a problem,” an agent says. “They don’t want to do anything to fix it.”
Agents say the Secret Service promotes those who have a similar mind-set and that agency directors stay for two or three years, then leave without changing the culture. As one example of poor management practices, they cite a statement made by a special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail. The supervisor said that no agents on the detail would ever be promoted because of the number of agents who are seeking promotions.
“The best you can hope for is to get to an office you can make the most of, because the next move will probably be your last,” the official told his own agents.
“Needless to say, morale went from low to rock bottom with that,” says an agent who was at the meeting. “Several agents left saying they were done, time to move on.”
Johnson says she accepts that by its very nature, a Secret Service agent’s job is demanding. While she was assigned to protect former president Clinton, he was constantly traveling all over the world. She could hardly ever plan anything in her personal life, because her schedule was his schedule.
What Johnson and others resented was that the Secret Service ignored simple opportunities to lessen the necessary burdens of the job. For example, the Secret Service lets agents know their schedules for the coming week late Friday afternoon, just before the weekend starts. As a result, agents are prevented from planning social and family events.
On trips, agents are expected to work virtually around the clock. In the past several years, the Secret Service imposed limits on overtime pay, offering compensatory time instead. But the agency often denies agents the opportunity to use compensatory or flextime they have earned in lieu of overtime pay. When flextime is taken, it usually must be taken within a week. If an agent has other duties already scheduled, the agent may be forced to forfeit the flextime. After seven years, an agent based in a major city might make upward of $110,000 a year without overtime.
“When you’re doing foreign advances, you’re working eighteen-and twenty-hour days, seven days a week, yet the schedule says you are working nine to five,” says an agent.
What this means is that the Secret Service pays overtime for weekends worked but not for additional hours during the week. In another twist, the agency, as a matter of practice delays paying out overtime earned for two or three years. In the fall of 2008, supervisors on the president’s protective detail even began refusing to record agents’ overtime pay. When agents began complaining to the financial management division, they were told by supervisors not to make further inquiries.
Paid or not, agents end up working eighteen-hour days.
“How tired do you get? Just imagine sleeping three or four hours a night for a week,” says an agent.
“Pilots have mandatory rest periods,” says a former agent. “But you’ve got a guy standing next to the president with a loaded gun who hasn’t had sleep in three days and has traveled through four different time zones.”
One night, the agent and his wife had an argument.
“You have no right to discipline your children, because you’re not their father,” his wife said to him. “You don’t act like their father; you’re never around.”
She was right, the former agent says.
“I was never around,” he says. “I was missing everything. I was missing Christmas, I was missing Thanksgiving.”
The agent quit.
The agency’s rigidity extends to administrative personnel. An investigative assistant who was a crackerjack at her job of providing agents with the data they needed asked for a schedule change. She wanted to come to work a half hour earlier than her current schedule called for and leave a half hour earlier so she could pick up her child at day care.
The Secret Service refused, so she left for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There, she got the schedule she wanted. She even got to work at home on Fridays.
After being a Secret Service agent for almost ten years, Johnson finally quit. She says the agency is mostly run by agents who are “old-school” and think everyone wants to join the Secret Service at any cost.
“In the old days, the Secret Service was a great gig,” Johnson says. “People lined up to join. They had applications on the shelves for years. People would drop everything at the drop of a hat to get a Secret Service job. It was great pay and offered stability. Well, times have changed, but their mentality hasn’t. People can go out and make a lot more money in the private sector, a lot more money on their own, for much less risk. Management’s attitude is almost as though we should literally be thanking them every day we wake up and have a job.”
The Secret Service has trouble finding qualified applicants to replace those who are driven away.
“Getting a number of applicants is not a problem. Getting qualified app
licants is always a problem,” Johnson says. “Because of the [service’s] high standard, a large portion of the population wouldn’t qualify to be an agent. They’ve done various things trying to recruit good people, but the bottom line is that their policies are driving away the good people they already have.”
“They chew their people up,” says a former agent. “They treat agents like the Apache Indians treated their horses: They would take their best horse and ride it and ride it, and when it dies, they finally eat it.”
17
Timberwolf
THE VICE PRESIDENT’S residence is a handsome 9,150-square-foot three-story mansion overlooking Massachusetts Avenue NW Complete with pool, pool house, and indoor gym, the white brick house was built in 1893 as the home of the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Congress turned it into the official residence of the vice president in 1974 and gave it the address One Observatory Circle.
Vice President Mondale was the first to live at the residence. While Mondale’s predecessor Nelson Rockefeller could have moved there, he chose to remain in his Foxhall Road estate in Washington and use the vice president’s residence for entertaining.
During the day, at least five navy stewards attend to every personal need of the second family, including cooking, shopping for food, cleaning, and doing the laundry. At night, the stewards—known as navy enlisted aides—bake chocolate chip cookies and other goodies for the second family. They also stash leftovers from parties in the refrigerator.
The Secret Service has a separate building—code-named Tower—on the grounds. The vice president’s residence itself is referred to by agents simply as “the res.”
Back when George H. W. Bush was vice president, Agent William Albracht was on the midnight shift at the vice president’s residence. Agents refer to the president’s protective detail as “the big show” and to the vice president’s protective detail as “the little show with free parking,” because unlike the White House, the vice president’s residence provides parking for agents.
In the President's Secret Service Page 12
