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Trouble Baked Into the Secret Service

March 16, 2015
Blog

By Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC)

Although heads at the top have rolled, endemic problems remain untouched at the U.S. Secret Service. Two apparently drunk senior agents barreled into White House barricades, no less, on March 4. Double the trouble resulted when the supervisor allegedly let the agents go without a sobriety test or arrest, even though they had upset a bomb investigation.

The problem—drunken agents—is a serial behavior issue harking back to similar embarrassments by agents—from engaging prostitutes in Columbia, to passing out drunk in open view in the Netherlands. The reason for such bad behavior in a zero-failure agency needs to be isolated and tackled head on. Surely, some Secret Service agents are not simply "bad boys" prone to bad behavior. Could some of this conduct come from what the recent Secret Service Protective Mission Panel's report said was the exponential increase in missions and duties for agents and officers that have produced 12-hour days and few days off due to lack of resources? And what about letting the agents who crashed into the White House barricades go and simply reassigning them? Together, the string of bad behavior followed by a lack of accountability speaks to an agency mired in baked-in cultural dysfunction that will take more than reassignments or even dismissals to fix. Some of the reported incidents should have been career-ending, in addition to deterrents to future bad behavior, but even the firings have not had that effect.

The new Secret Service Director, Joseph Clancy, has a much greater challenge than reengineering the management of the agency. He must unravel the culture of misbehavior, cover ups, and demoralization. As the dismissals at the top have shown, this is too difficult to achieve by the usual penalties alone. According to the Protective Mission Panel's report, among the needed remedies are relief from chronic overwork, long hours, few days off, and lack of training. The Panel said that 85 new special agents and 200 Uniformed Division Officers are minimally necessary for starters.

Congress has criticized the leadership of the agency, and the leadership has been changed with no results yet. Of course, the Secret Service's budget, part of the Department of Homeland Security appropriations, was passed by Congress just a couple weeks ago, and Director Clancy has been on the job for less than a month. Already though, a clear-headed analysis cannot escape the necessity to look more closely beneath the covers to problems that have accumulated with the men and women who daily carry out the weighty and unique task of protecting the President of the United States and the First Family.