A new Washington Post review found that the causes of the mistakes in Butler, the Secret Service’s biggest security failure since the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, had been “years in the making.” For instance, in the days before Donald Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the agency turned to a “junior” member of the detail – who had only started in the protective detail in 2023 - to develop a security plan, according to an independent review panel commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security. In the past, the Secret Service would have trained new agents in a field office for a minimum of five years and had them work at least two more in a protective detail before assigning them to oversee such a large public event, multiple former agents told The Washington Post.
The July 13 shooting, in which the agency’s failure to block sight lines from a nearby rooftop allowed a gunman with limited firearms training to come close to killing Trump, stunned many Americans and prompted lawmakers to ask what had happened to an agency long charged with keeping sitting and former presidents safe. Besides a bullet that grazed Trump’s ear, the shooting left one spectator dead and two injured. Spurred by a string of humiliating security lapses during the Obama administration, the White House and Congress had launched separate investigations in 2014 that diagnosed the Secret Service as being in crisis and stretched beyond its abilities. The investigative panels recommended sharp increases in agent training and the hiring of fresh leadership to disrupt an insular culture that the probes said tended to cover up problems rather than own and fix them. But three presidents and Congress have failed to fix the major vulnerabilities in the Secret Service that were identified a decade ago, the Post review found. Instead, some problems have grown worse and left the agency weaker on key measures. For instance, the agency was never able to hire enough staff to spare agents for routine training; instead its mission expanded and was shouldered by an overworked workforce, leading to burnout and low morale.
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