The exhaustion of the secret services contributed to the failure of the assassination attempts

The former president was unharmed Sunday after a potential shooter hiding in the tree-lined Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach was spotted and shot by a Secret Service agent. The suspect managed to flee the scene unharmed, but thanks to the details of an eyewitness, he was identified and apprehended by the law enforcement officers shortly after the incident.

On July 14, Trump faced more scrutiny when he was injured during a campaign rally after a suspect sitting on a rooftop overlooking the event fired his rifle into the crowd. One rally participant was killed and two others were injured during the shooting. A Secret Service sniper killed the suspect in the July incident.

Kenneth Valentine, a former Secret Service special agent in charge who served under three presidents, told Business Insider that security around the former president was increased after the July incident, and the Secret Service faced intense scrutiny for not managed to prevent the shooting. He said agents should have been on high alert, making Sunday’s near miss far too close for comfort.

“Didn’t we have the time or didn’t have the assets and resources to sweep that wood line and post it to a police officer in time?” Valentine said. “I think it would have been a great deal to do.”

I still do business with the treasury

Valentine — as well as Jeffrey James, who spent 22 years in the Secret Service — told BI that the agency has struggled with adequate staffing levels and resources since it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

The agency, founded in 1865, had previously been under the control of the Treasury Department with the mission of combating counterfeiting. Although the Secret Service no longer reports to Treasury officials, its agents have maintained investigative assignments related to credit card fraud and cybercrime.

“I think the Secret Service should drop all of that and just be the executive protection arm of DHS,” James said. “If I were to make decisions, I would push them to eliminate all of their investigations other than investigating threats against people under Secret Service protection.”

Instead, both Valentine and James said they believed agents were stretched thin, forced to work absurd amounts of overtime, and said there was an incredibly high attrition rate in the field that the Secret Service couldn’t keep up with. .

“I’ve never gotten to a point in my career where I’ve been fully staffed,” James said. “I was always in the deficit because you always play from behind.”

In his experience, many agents left the Secret Service before they retired, James said — a natural occurrence in any field if people decide the gig isn’t for them — “but we were such a small agency that it really became a detriment”.

“I’ll tell you, we’ve had people drive the president’s limousine for enough hours in one day that if they were driving a truck for Walmart, they’d be told to park the truck and stop driving,” James said , adding that agents were on board. road for so long that it was no longer safe for them or their passengers.

Word from above

Valentine said if you hear the top people say it, they’ll talk about how the agency has hired at a rate that exceeds all previous years combined.

“And he’s like, well, yeah, that’s true, but tell me about your wear,” Valentine said.

Officers work long hours, including weekends and holidays, and give up personal time to take on the Sisyphean task of risking their lives to protect the country’s most important people. Salaries start at under $70,000 annually, according to a 2021 salary scale.

When reached for comment, a Secret Service representative directed Business Insider to comments made by Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe during a news conference Monday after the second security incident involving Trump. In his remarks, Rowe indicated that Secret Service leadership is aware of burnout among its agents.

“We have immediate needs. We have future needs,” Rowe said, referring to the anti-sniper training the agency is asking Congress to approve. “We also need to make sure we get the staff we have and that requires us to be able to have funding to be able to hire more people.”

Rowe added: “You can’t just give me money and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to make sure everybody gets overtime.’ Because the men and women of the Secret Service right now, we’re putting them in the red.”

According to agency statistics, the Secret Service has about 3,600 special agents, including 1,600 uniformed division officers and about 2,000 administrative and support personnel. Of the Department of Homeland Security’s total budget of $64.81 billion, the Secret Service was allocated $3.27 billion in 2024, up less than $400,000 from 2022.

Secret Service agents “rise to the moment,” Rowe said, but “we have to have this every day. We can’t have failures. And to do that, we’re going to have some tough conversations with Congress, and I’m going to make it happen.”