Protecting the President

by Dan Bongino

  Secret Service leadership failed the agents on multiple fronts during my tenure with the agency, but one specific management-caused problem was particularly damaging to morale during this period. In the decades before I entered the Secret Service in 1999, it wasn’t uncommon for a Secret Service agent to relocate multiple times in his or her career. This need to constantly move agents around the country was due to the agency’s protection requirements, which were largely based out of Washington, DC, where both the Presidential and Vice Presidential Protective divisions (PPD and VPPD, respectively) were located. If you were an agent hired to work out of an office in Montana, then the standard career path for you would be approximately five to eight years in Montana; a transfer to either the PPD or VPPD in Washington, DC; a transfer to a second Washington, DC–based assignment; and then a transfer back to a field office outside of Washington, DC. If you were actively seeking a promotion, then you would have to relocate again, most likely back to Washington, DC, to fill an open supervisory position either at the Secret Service headquarters or on the PPD or VPPD. In the tighter job markets of the early 1990s, this was a small price to pay for the stability of a high-paying and well-respected job as a Secret Service agent. But as the late 1990s technology economy took off, and as the post–September 11, 2001, federal law enforcement hiring boom followed, it made little sense to remain in a job where you were expected to uproot your family and move every few years when you could earn the same amount of money, or more, in another federal law enforcement position, or the private sector.

  There were few policies in the Secret Service despised more than the informal “you have to take a move” policy. Adding insult to injury, many of the headquarters-based managers who had the power to fix these problems instead dismissed the concerns of a growing body of agents who were rapidly tiring of endless travel in support of the protection mission and the pressure to constantly relocate to places where they had no roots. Yet, despite the changing job conditions in the economy at large, and the dramatic post 9/11 uptick in hiring among other federal law enforcement agencies that had no such relocation requirement, the Secret Service management refused to change the informal relocation policy, while making only token changes to the “career track” options for agents. In an effort to stem the growing tide of discontent surrounding the extensive protection-related travel, and the unnecessary relocation requirement, Secret Service management introduced new career tracks intended to allow special agents to stay in one field office and avoid relocating their families. But although agents were now eligible for a new “investigative career track” (created in response to the attrition problem resulting from the relocation requirement), enabling them to stay in their original field office for an extended period of time, management never took the career track seriously. Agents who chose the new investigative career track quickly figured out that it was a raw deal in two respects. First, many of the agents who chose the new career track in order to spend more time with their families and avoid relocating to new homes in far-away places, often found their families alone anyway, as the agents were still being bombarded with ROTA protection assignments on the road. Second, most of the agents who chose not to relocate in favor of the new investigative career track were locked out of promotion assignments because they never served on a protection detail and were subsequently ineligible to bid for promotion on supervisory positions on those protective details. Combine this with the inescapable reality within the Secret Service that the culture was one that valued service on a full-time protection detail (agents who never served in these protective assignments were viewed as second-class citizens), and the pressure to relocate and join a protective detail, or to find another job in federal law enforcement, became overwhelming. The Secret Service could have solved this problem, and the NSSE problem, and the ECTF problem, and the never-ending mission creep problem, by simply stating the obvious: the Secret Service had outgrown their investigative mission. By focusing exclusively on the protection mission, and abandoning portions of the investigative mission no longer suited to their workforce capacities, the Secret Service would only have to relocate a special agent once, when the agent was hired.

  The relocation requirement for special agents was a hammer to agent morale that the Secret Service still has not recovered from. And the failure to change this organizational relic, or to streamline the Secret Service’s mission, is the fault of Secret Service management who seemingly cannot see the forest for the trees. But another morale killer in the Secret Service, which is not the fault of Secret Service management, is the salary cap imposed upon its special agents. The Secret Service is one of the few federal law enforcement agencies that pays overtime. Most federal law enforcement agents have overtime pay built into their regular paychecks through a program called LEAP (Law Enforcement Availability Pay), where the agent’s salary requirements are covered by an annual salary plus an additional 25 percent of his or her salary to cover anticipated overtime hours. LEAP largely covers the additional overtime hours federal law enforcement agents routinely work, in addition to their eight-hour workdays, to compensate the agents for such things as after-hours surveillance operations, arrests, and other investigative operational requirements that wouldn’t ordinarily fit into a standard eight-hour workday. As a result, most federal agencies don’t routinely pay additional overtime, outside of LEAP, because it’s rare for their agents to work more than the 25 percent LEAP supplement included in their pay package. This is not the case with Secret Service agents. The investigative, and protection-related, mission creep, and the relocation requirements, caused an attrition death spiral beginning in the early 2000s that continues through today. As the special agent workforce shrunk, not in nominal terms but relative to the expanding Secret Service mission, and the hiring of new agents struggled to keep pace, the remaining agents were forced to pick up additional ROTA assignments, which resulted in millions of dollars in additional overtime costs accrued as a result of having to pay a smaller cadre of agents for more hours worked. The mission requirements of the Secret Service are clear; when a security plan calls for thirty agents to stand post at a rally site for a Secret Service protectee, then the Secret Service is going to find exactly thirty agents to fulfill the mission. They don’t really care how long you’ve been on the road or how tired you are if you’re one of the agents assigned the task. Working without days off, and traveling from state to state with little sleep, in support of the protection mission is tedious enough, but doing it for no additional compensation has been devastating to the agent workforce. Secret Service agent compensation, along with other federal agent pay, is legislatively capped at approximately $160,000 per year, and in busy election seasons, which now run up to two years long, it is not uncommon for agents to max out their overtime pay by April or May. (Note: the federal fiscal year used for budgeting, and to calculate compensation, runs from October to the end of September, not January to the end of December.) Once an agent is “maxed out” (Secret Service jargon for earning the maximum amount of money allowable under the salary cap), then that agent cannot earn any more overtime pay, and any hours worked and accumulated after his or her forty-hour workweek, plus the agent’s ten hours of LEAP per week, are uncompensated.

  I fully understand how many of you reading this would question why this is such a big deal. After all, $160,000 per year is a lot of money. Yes, you are correct: that is a lot of money for a position within the federal government, and no Secret Service agent I know would dispute that. But it’s not the amount of money that most of the agents have a problem with; it’s the structure of their pay relative to other federal law enforcement agencies that has damaged Secret Service morale. Here’s a simple test: would you remain in a job that asks you to work seventy-plus hours a week for the same salary as a similar job requiring only fifty hours a week? My guess is you probably wouldn’t. Many agents stay behind because they love the mission of the Secret Service and they love their country, but many are leaving to take position
s with the BATF, the IRS, the DEA, the FBI, and other agencies, because they, and their families, are simply burned-out from spending close to a decade of their lives on the road. I remember having a conversation with a former Secret Service agent who had resigned to take a position with another federal law enforcement agency. He told me that his boss’s desk was littered with applications and résumés from Secret Service agents looking to leave the Secret Service and join his agency. It was depressing to hear. No one wants to be part of an agency where they feel as though they’re going to be the last one to turn the lights out as everyone leaves.

  The Secret Service cannot effectively protect the president in the future with its current portfolio of problems. Mission creep has saddled the Secret Service with an expanded plate of responsibilities that it no longer has the manpower, budget, or training to effectively handle. Poor management decisions, made with the best interests of upper-level Secret Service management but the worst interests of the working agents in the field in mind, have also ravaged the workforce and destroyed both special agent morale, and faith in the leadership. When combined with a special agent pay scale that incentivizes Secret Service agents to seek employment elsewhere within the federal law enforcement alphabet soup of agencies, it’s no surprise that failures have begun to pile up within the Secret Service. No organization, whether public or private, can be expected to perform at an elite level, and with zero operational errors, while simultaneously losing their best employees and saddling those who remain with hostility toward the organization and its leadership.

  2

  THE UNIFORMED DIVISION OFFICER MESS

  ALL TOO OFTEN, WHEN I Read media reports about newsworthy events involving the Secret Service, the reporter incorrectly identifies the Secret Service personnel involved. The Secret Service as currently constituted has two separate entities with different, albeit slightly overlapping, functions. The Secret Service special agent side of the agency is responsible for the protection of the president of the United States. The special agents follow the president around both on and off the White House grounds. They are the “body men.” They surround and protect the human body elected to the office of the U.S. presidency. You’ve likely seen the special agent side of the Secret Service as portrayed in popular culture in movies such as In the Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood and, on the criminal-investigative side, as portrayed in movies such as To Live and Die in L.A., starring William Petersen. Secret Service special agents do not wear uniforms, and they are most often dressed in suits and ties with their weapons, ammunition, communications gear, handcuffs, and flashlights concealed underneath their suit jackets. They are recognizable by their lapel pins, which change often for security measures, and their iconic earpieces. The earpiece has become so tied to the image of the Secret Service special agent that I often heard White House staffers speak of “earpiece envy,” their desire for an earpiece-wearing security detail of their own because of the impressive visual that creates. Having served on the special agent side of the Secret Service, and having protected many of these high-ranking executive branch personnel, I always found this to be a curious phenomenon. After a few months of having a full-time Secret Service protective detail, most of the people I protected, outside of the president, found it slightly embarrassing being followed around constantly by burly special agents in suits and earpieces. I recall an incident with one protectee who was trying to get a haircut on a weekend in suburban Maryland. Horrified at the thought of a couple of guys in suits standing over the barber during the haircut, the protectee preferred that we wait outside of the barber shop.

  Ironically, the earpiece as a distinguishing mark of who is, and who isn’t, a Secret Service agent brings with it some comedy. While working a presidential daughter’s detail in Northern California with an agent friend of mine, the earpiece, or lack thereof, actually saved us from being outed as agents. I was holding the cars that day (an agent always stays with the vehicles to ensure the quick availability of an escape option and to prevent an adversary from planting a listening device or explosive on the car), and my partner for the day walked back to the car with the protectee and starting laughing. I asked him what was so funny and he said he had been in a high-end shoe store with the protectee when two women thought they recognized her and began to loudly wonder whether that was her or a doppelganger. The women went back and forth for a moment saying “Is it her?” before settling on the fact that it couldn’t be her because there were no Secret Service agents around. How did they come to that conclusion? One woman told the other, “We would see their Secret Service earpieces.”

  The earpiece marker has also led to some uncomfortable moments with low-level White House staff members during my career. In my early days on the Presidential Protective Division, I was assigned to an overseas trip with President George W. Bush, and one of the White House staffers we were working with got himself caught up in a small imbroglio surrounding an earpiece. A lesson I learned early on in my tenure as a Secret Service agent is that in many formerly Communist and authoritarian countries, the people that make the decisions for the foreign government hold the gun carriers in high esteem. As one military/security representative (sometimes it’s difficult to appropriately distinguish between these two roles in countries with a history of authoritarian rule) once told me, “He who has the guns, has the power.” The low-level White House staffer on the trip learned this lesson early in the visit, and every time he was asked by a host-government representative, not familiar with the staff/Secret Service breakdown, if he was a Secret Service agent, he would say “I’m with the Secret Service.” Now, technically, he wasn’t lying. He was “with the Secret Service” but he wasn’t actually with the Secret Service. But he had a radio and an earpiece, and he needed to get things done, and he knew that the host-government would likely ignore him if they knew he was a low-level staff member (with no gun), so he kept up the charade of being “with the Secret Service” for days.

  The charade came to a halt when a host-government representative approached me and told me he was going to move a piece of equipment because the “Secret Service agent told me to.” I asked him which agent had told him that and he pointed to the White House staff member. I’d had enough at this point (this staff member and I had some history), and although it was going to be uncomfortable because I really didn’t want to embarrass the poor guy, I called him over and asked him point-blank, “Did you tell this guy you were a Secret Service agent?” He started to sweat and I knew he was cornered. I asked the host-government official to leave to avoid further embarrassing the staffer, but I wasn’t going to let it go without letting him know the gravity of what he did. Impersonating a federal agent is a crime, I told him (granted, calling this particular incident a “crime” was probably a stretch, but this staffer was causing some problems on the trip and needed a stern warning), and I warned him that if he did it again it was going “up the chain” (Secret Service lingo for getting White House and Secret Service management involved). The staffer kept the earpiece in his ear after that but, thankfully, dropped the “I’m with the Secret Service” act.

  The other side of the Secret Service, not immediately recognizable by the suits-and-earpiece combination (although they have earpieces too), is the Uniformed Division. Uniformed Division personnel are not agents; they are federal police officers, and they are recognizable by their black-and-white, police-style uniforms. Most Uniformed Division officers wear a standard white, button-down, collared shirt with the presidential seal on the left shoulder and a black tie in the winter and fall months. Due to the oppressive Washington, DC, heat, they wear white short-sleeve shirts with no tie in the spring and summer months. Their pants are black and otherwise indistinct. The Secret Service Uniformed Division uniform was routinely mocked, oftentimes by the officers themselves. A few of my agent friends who had transferred to the special agent side from the Uniformed Division told me they hated the uniform and that they used to derisively call it the “Black Kn
ights of the Potomac” uniform.

  The Uniformed Division is separate and distinct from the agent side of the Secret Service, and although they fall under the collective Secret Service agency umbrella, they have separate functions, job categories, and job descriptions. Secret Service agents are GS-1811-designated federal employees with the official titles “criminal investigator” and “special agent,” while Uniformed Division Officers are federal police officers. Today’s Secret Service Uniformed Division came about when the Secret Service absorbed the White House Police Force and their responsibilities.

  In contrast to the special agent’s primary responsibility, which is to protect the physical body elected to the U.S. presidency, the Uniformed Division’s primary role in the presidential security plan is to protect the White House structure, whether the president is physically present, or not. Notice the difference here, because this is where the media frequently screws up the reporting of security incidents at the White House. The agents secure the physical body, not the White House structure. Therefore, if a fence jumper at the White House jumps the fence when the president is not at the White House, then there is a slim chance that special agents will intervene to stop it, because they would be with the president on the road, not at the White House. But you’ll frequently hear media figures report that the fence jumpers where apprehended by “agents,” when in the overwhelming majority of incidents, they were not apprehended by agents, but by Uniformed Division officers. It may seem like nit-picking, but this persistent mistake drives many agents crazy because, as we saw with both Omar J. Gonzalez (the north-grounds fence jumper who made it all the way into the White House in late 2014) and Jonathan Tran (the north-side Treasury Building fence jumper who made it all the way to the south portico of the White House), it was primarily Uniformed Division personnel, not special agents, who were responsible for the security lapses. I am not pointing this out to pile on the Uniformed Division. After all, the special agent side has had their own share of debacles, ranging from the Colombia scandal to the two agents caught taking selfies with President Trump’s grandson. I am pointing it out because diagnosing and fixing the security lapses at the White House requires that we identify the correct set of personnel, or else there’s little chance of fixing the problem. Also, it hurts morale on both the agent and the Uniformed Division sides of the Secret Service when one side, having little responsibility for a security problem, is held to account for something they didn’t do. I, along with a number of other still active agent friends of mine, have vivid memories of the Omar Gonzalez fence-jumping incident and the widespread Secret Service mockery that followed. Although I had long since resigned from the Secret Service, I remember being at my daughter’s bus stop, waiting for the bus to pick her up, when a few of my neighbors were laughing at the incompetence of the Secret Service “agents” because they couldn’t stop a war veteran with a bad knee from leaping the north-lawn fence and making it into the White House. They were surprised when I informed them that the agents had left just minutes earlier with President Obama from the opposite side of the White House as he departed for Camp David on Marine One and that it was Uniformed Division personnel involved in the breach. Ironically, it was an off-duty special agent from the Counter Assault Team who tackled Gonzalez on the State Floor of the White House and stopped a disturbing incident from becoming a disastrous one.