Secrets of the Secret Service

by Gary J. Byrne

  Though millennials are often the objects of this insult, I find that it far more fitting for the old stalwarts within our government.

  Ask yourself: When you listen to music, do you judge how “good” or “moving” a song is by how many hours the artist tells you he or she put into it? No, because that would be absurd. When you shop for a car or refrigerator, do you consider how hard the company said it worked on the product? That would also be absurd. A consumer wants to know two things: What will the product achieve for me? and Is it within my budget?

  If we don’t accept this “snowflake mentality” anywhere else in our society, why should we accept it from a congressman, an agency director, a post-standing White House officer, or a Presidential Protection Division agent?

  Snowflakes within the government, no matter what their political affiliation, cite how hard or how many hours they’ve worked. How many times have you heard “My office and I will work tirelessly”? It’s the easily spotted trademark of political snowflakes. When someone questions their results and fulfilling the campaign promises they made, snowflakes take offense and talk about how hard they’ve worked.

  But only one thing matters: results.

  Before we get into exactly how the United States can achieve good results in the Secret Service’s two core missions, we must first promise ourself that we will not accept the petty arguments of snowflakes; instead we will accept only what will achieve results and coldly cast out what is failing.

  President Reagan said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this Earth!”

  President Kennedy said, “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” That same president also said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

  Coincidentally, both of those presidents were shot while under Secret Service protection. One survived.

  If we take their wisdom to heart and apply it to what we know about the Secret Service’s history, its present, and its near future, the guidelines for changing that future are apparent. The solutions will be uncomfortable; we must be willing to destroy what we have built and start fresh; and we must change our culture to embrace our defeats as much as our victories.

  If we do the opposite and seek to achieve results by acting within the confines of what is convenient and comfortable for everyone at the table and are not willing to cast out what is broken, we will have to ask ourselves: Would we rather repeat the worst of our history or the best? All Americans who have achieved greatly had two things in common: they embraced the discomfort involved in taking risks, and they took decisive action.

  Our political representatives should take government agencies down a peg—or down entirely—with the same fervor as they create and expand them.

  Numerous presidents, from Presidents Reagan and Clinton to, most notably and recently, President Trump, have proudly proclaimed, “Let’s make America great again!” President Trump also promised to “drain the swamp.” He knows that when you drain the swamp, you’re left with alligators. He promised that “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” Where better to start than with the most failing, bloated, downtrodden, and critically important federal law enforcement agency?

  The Secret Service will never fix itself. We cannot rely on the same people who are responsible for making the Secret Service fail to make it succeed. But right now and for the past few decades, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing—and it needs to stop. After two decades of Congress asking politely that the Secret Service stop failing, it is clear that it needs to stop being polite and start demanding.

  The Secret Service argues that it is unique and that its responsibility of executive protection is so important that Congress is playing chicken with catastrophe if it tries to make changes. Its leaders argue that only made men should be able to make changes to the service—yet aren’t they the people responsible for its downfall?

  This is especially ironic considering that Congress created the service and continually expands and funds it. Moreover, the Secret Service exists to protect the constitutional system, which includes a legislative branch, meaning that the legislature should and does have some say in managing the agency. Setting aside the political cynicism that Congress and the President have been bought by Secret Service lobbyists or that consensus can be garnered only via sudden tragedy, only Congress can save the two core missions of the Secret Service.

  Before we can address solutions, we must first define the problems. These are the major ones:

  • The Secret Service cannot be relied on to protect the president. Assassinations, near misses, and continued gross misconduct refute the claim that all of these are a series of isolated incidents.

  • The Secret Service is antitransparency and anti–First Amendment. This is unacceptable. We must recognize that the only reasons we know the Secret Service is failing is because of whistle-blowers, memoirs of former employees, and dedicated journalists such as Carol Leonnig and Susan Crabtree at newspapers such as the Washington Post who refuse to be intimidated.

  • The Secret Service is repeating the same mistakes that allowed for assassinations of the past, going back to President Lincoln and before.

  • When internal or third parties review the Secret Service and make recommendations, those recommendations are ignored.

  • The Secret Service has a long-standing culture issue that values pridefulness, arrogance, complacency, groupthink, and blind loyalty to the agency.

  • The Secret Service culture has issues with numerous prejudices. Its most common is the rivalry between agents and officers, and between ranks, but the racism faced by Agent Abraham Bolden or the sexism faced by Sue Ann Baker is not isolated (as they revealed in their memoirs). Though the service has become much better in this area than it was several decades ago, we must also recognize that the politically correct solutions of forcing the agency to meet quotas and prioritize diversity of appearance have only made the “plantation mentality” worse. All of these prejudices serve a greater goal: to boil the frog so slowly that it doesn’t realize it’s being cooked. Today the prejudices are symptomatic of a much greater cultural issue. As long as agents and officers are forced to accept inhumane working conditions and hours, agents and officers will treat each other with equal spite. The agency has prioritized chasing self-imposed diversity goals by prematurely hiring agents and officers without security clearances pending background investigations. Those agents and officers are routinely placed in areas such as the West Wing, where they routinely come in contact with top secret information.

  From this day forward, there are only two ways this situation is going to go.

  First, I offer you the risky and uncomfortable Plan A. Plan B, which seems far more convenient, can be implemented as early as tomorrow. If you are a political or Secret Service snowflake, brace yourself for Plan A.

  Strategic Restructuring

  These changes are for Congress and the president to institute by law, not recommendation.

  The Secret Service should be split into two separate groups by mission. The Secret Service by name will no longer be “secret,” since that has been part of the excuse for horrible abuses. Eliminating the “secret” culture is the only way to make clear that it is at an end and that the president’s security, not the agency or its made men, is priority number one.

  The two missions, protection and investigative, should be split entirely and made into two separate agencies. The protective side of the new agency would be given a new name. We’ll call it the Executive Branch Protection Service (EBPS) for now, but Congress and the president can rename it whatever they want. The goal should not be a “cool” name, just a simple name that is descriptive of what the agency is and does. “Secret Service” as a name no longer adequately describes what the agen
cy does. It hasn’t applied to the organization since Abraham Lincoln’s and Andrew Johnson’s presidencies, when the group was created to fight counterfeiting only. The EBPS would remain under the Department of Homeland Security to conduct presidential protection and protection of foreign dignitaries. Securing and protecting the public at major national events is a part of the DHS’s mission, so it should be taken away from the Secret Service and delegated to the DHS entirely.

  EBPS would establish new field offices in every major city for the sake of tracking down threateners and threats and aiding in advance protection work. But agents, whether they keep that name or not, will go back to the pre-1937 Secret Service mentality of “operatives,” operating alone, in pairs, or in small groups, tracking down threateners and then, when necessary, calling upon local authorities for their assistance and muscle. But those offices should be small and contain no more than a handful of agents who work with local and nearby federal police forces.

  The new EBPS force, being focused on protection only, should truncate its management extremely and completely ax superfluous branches, divisions, and offices that do nothing but take responsibility away from supervisors who should be holding their subordinates accountable. The agency does not need both an Office of Professional Responsibility and an Office of Integrity. The practice of dispatching bad agents to indefinite and fraudulent investigations that go on forever as a way to insulate them from punishment must be abolished. EBPS should have only three divisions: an Agent Division, a Uniformed Division, and a Technical Services Division—that’s it.

  Congress must mandate that all federal agencies post their agencywide hierarchy in a graphic representation based on manpower, rank, and mission and make it available to the public online. This visual representation must include every office, division, bureau, branch, committee, and team. Ideally, each hierarchy should appear in a pyramid shape that is widest at the bottom. Many agencies are bloated and top-heavy, and the graphic representation will reveal what agencies are the fattest, the most cantankerous, and the most structurally ineffective.

  Ideally, agencies should be widest at the bottom, so there are enough officers and agents to do the job with rest and adequate training, and narrowest at the top, where there is one director and his deputies.

  As for the investigative side of the Secret Service, that should be renamed the Treasury Investigative Service and be moved back where it belongs, within the Treasury Department. Financial crime in whatever form, whether it be electronic intrusions into banks or retirement frauds, identity theft, or counterfeiting of money, is the responsibility of the Treasury, not the DHS, the department designed to thwart terrorism. Financial crimes can be the result of terrorism, but they are always a Treasury matter. The old Secret Service field offices could be retained by the new Treasury agency.

  Evolving Protection and the Agency That Fulfills It

  The new era in presidential protection needs to foster a culture of selflessness, a military mentality in which everyone is trained to be replaceable so that if, for whatever reason, one person is out of action, another can seamlessly fill his or her place. It needs to be made clear that no one is above oversight, sickness, days off, etc. All agents and officers must have both primary and secondary capabilities, such as advanced medical or marksmanship capabilities. All agents and officers could serve twenty to twenty-five years and would then be required to retire. There would be no waivers, except in the most extreme of times. There would be no more “double dipping,” whereby agents or officers retire from one agency and transition to another to restart the clock. Federal law enforcement must always be a young person’s game whose leadership isn’t afraid to mix it up and keep their teeth sharp on the front lines, so their agency can fulfill its mission. Part of a service member’s later years of service need to be spent transitioning his or her knowledge, expertise, roles, and responsibilities to new recruits. Mandated turnover will help keep the agency’s performance sharp and resolute.

  That’s why standards must become performance based—based purely on test scores in physical, tactical, aptitude, and other areas. Not only must every agent and officer meet the basic standards to maintain employment, but everyone’s scores should be posted for the rest of the agency to see. PPD agents need to be chosen based on tryouts. Competition increases pride and camaraderie and grounds protectors in realism as opposed to arrogance. That practice would foster hard competition to be the best.

  A performance-based scoring system for agents and officers would also force management to treat employees fairly based solely on how well they do their jobs. At present the Secret Service’s leadership works its employees like machines, treats them as if they are inferior and with contempt, while simultaneously expecting them to be glad to be there and perform as it pushes them to fly closer to the sun.

  The service still has trouble treating all its workers fairly. In 2017, it settled a racial discrimination lawsuit with a hundred agents for $24 million. The first female agents weren’t given proper holsters, and decades later female agents have been eyed by opportunistic presidential staffers as the means of increasing a president’s likability with female voters. Yet agencywide, the worst is how the service subjects its lowest-ranking employees to sensitivity training while flagrantly letting higher-up agents get away scot free with sexual abuse of their female subordinates. Performance-based scoring would also help with the service’s greatest prejudice: the rift between UD and agents.

  If and when an employee does not meet the minimum score requirements, there would be a probationary period, then penalties would be imposed, and if the employee does not improve, he or she would be fired. As long as firings get rid of nondedicated, unfit, or bad characters, they are good.

  There would be no more supervisory positions for agents who have not served in the role they are supervising. This would be an easy way to push out the undesirables who have been moved to supervisory positions, a process in which corrupt agencies promote bad apples instead of firing them or referring them to the Department of Justice for criminal proceedings. Too much of the protection side’s manpower is tied up in paper pushing and redundancy. That has to stop.

  Fraternization rules need to be enforced. If two Secret Service members start dating, they must formally notify their supervisors. Dating of protectees, including presidential and facilities staffs, agents, and officers must also require notification of supervisors—so that the personnel can be removed from the detail. Adultery cannot be tolerated by the agency because it creates drama and poor morale, deteriorates integrity and trust, and creates an imbalance between the workforce and its performance.

  Uniformed Division Solutions

  To understand the heart of the issue that has led to the worst morale in the federal government today, you must understand the typical workday of a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer.

  The typical day of a UD officer usually begins with a 1.5-hour commute to work, 30 minutes spent finding parking, an 8-hour shift before overtime, typically 4 hours of overtime, and then a 1.5-hour commute home, repeated six to seven days a week. That’s 14- to 17-hour days, six to seven days a week, during which officers are expected to perform like athletes and think like lawyers and are treated with contempt by many on the street and many more within their own agency. On top of that are the real dangers of the job.

  This is simply not a sustainable practice for most any human being.

  Secret Service officers’ salaries are between forty and eighty thousand dollars per year before overtime, for which there is no annual cap. The annual income before overtime is not enough to live within DC, so officers live in Maryland, Virginia, or even as far away as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. For emergency response purposes they’re supposed to live within less than a 25-mile radius away, but that ideal has long been swept aside. Officers are supposed to have eight hours from the time they turn the key on their home door to the time they leave their home to ensure that they’re well rested, but that
too has been thrown out the window. Numerous government agencies receive public transportation subsidies to incentivize the use of public transportation, but with officers living so far away and with their odd schedules, public transportation hasn’t filled the gap. In all, officers at the White House are spending more time on the job than with their families.

  Though some might argue that UD officers should “suck it up” because there are more demanding jobs that pay less, that is to completely miss the point. It is true that there are jobs in the military that pay less, where soldiers face far greater dangers and see their family far less—but military men and women have what Secret Service officers and agents don’t: a sense of fulfillment. Secret Service officers and agents don’t do the job for the money. Some exceptional officers work so much overtime that they make more than $230,000 a year—one officer interviewed made more than the head of DHS at $250,000—and they are still quitting. In 2017, pundits are predicting that if only Congress would stop being stingy, the Secret Service would no longer have a morale, mission, or hiring problem; they couldn’t be more wrong, especially since UD officers, who have no pay caps, are leading the charge to leave. Secret Service officers and agents do the job because they believe in the service’s mission, but as soon as they find out that their leadership doesn’t believe in the mission themselves, they decide to make their money and quit. They transfer to an agency that gives them a sense of fulfillment: serving their country, maintaining their dignity, and giving them time to be part of their families’ lives. When the sense of fulfillment is lost, officers and agents quit.

  The question is: Who do you want protecting the president, someone who is well rested and balanced or someone who’s exhausted and on the edge? Divorce, suicide, stress-related deaths such as falling asleep at the wheel, and heart attacks are rampant within USSS, as is being emotionally distraught.