REUTERS/Larry Downing
Incidents like Sunday's apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump show the Secret Service is stretched so thin due to short staffing that potential dangers are becoming increasingly hard to respond to adequately, two former agents told Business Insider.
In a Monday press conference discussing the incident, the acting director of the Secret Service called for "some hard conversations with Congress."
The former president was unharmed on Sunday after a would-be shooter hiding in the perimeter treeline of the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach was spotted and fired upon by a Secret Service agent. The suspect was able to flee the scene unharmed but, thanks to details from an eyewitness, was identified and detained by law enforcement shortly after the incident.
On July 14, Trump faced a closer call when he was wounded during a campaign rally after a suspect perched upon a rooftop overlooking the event fired his rifle into the crowd. A rally attendee was killed, and two others were injured in 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 ratcheted up after the July incident, and the Secret Service faced intense scrutiny for failing to prevent the shooting. He said agents should have been on high alert, making Sunday's near-miss far too close for comfort.
"Did we not have time, or did we not have the assets and resources to sweep that wood line and post it with a police officer ahead of time?" Valentine said. "It seems to me like that would have been great business to do."
Valentine — as well as Jeffrey James, who spent 22 years in the Secret Service — told BI the agency has been struggling with staffing levels and adequate resources since it was rolled up under the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
The agency, founded in 1865, had previously been under the purview of the Department of the Treasury with a mission to combat counterfeiting. Though the Secret Service no longer reports to Treasury officials, its agents have maintained investigative assignments related to credit card fraud and cybercrime.
"I believe the Secret Service should give up all of that and just be the executive protection arm of DHS," James said. "If I was making decisions, I would push them to eliminate all their investigations, aside from investigating threats toward people under Secret Service protection."
Instead, both Valentine and James said they believed the agents are stretched too thin, forced to work absurd amounts of overtime, and said there's an incredibly high rate of attrition in the field that the Secret Service can't keep up with.
"We never hit a time in my career where we were fully staffed," James said. "We were always in a deficit because you're always playing from behind."
In his experience, many agents left the Secret Service before their retirement, James said — a natural occurrence in any field if people decide the gig is not for them — "but we were such a small agency that it really became a detriment."
"I will tell you we had people driving the president's limousine for enough hours in a day that if they drove a truck for Walmart, they would be told to park the truck and not drive anymore," James said, adding that agents were on the road for so long it was no longer safe for them or their passengers.
Valentine said that if you hear the top brass tell it, they'll talk about how the agency has been hiring at a rate exceeding all previous combined years.
"And it's like, well, yeah, that's true, but tell me about your attrition," Valentine said.
Officers work long hours, including weekends and holidays, and forego personal time to take on the Sisyphean task of risking their lives to protect the country's highest-profile people. Salaries start at under $70,000 annually, according to a 2021 pay scale.
When reached for comment, a representative for the Secret Service directed Business Insider to comments made by Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe during a press conference on Monday following the second security incident involving Trump. In his remarks, Rowe indicated the Secret Service's leadership is aware of burnout among its agents.
"We have immediate needs. We have future needs, too," Rowe said, referring to counter-sniper training that the agency is petitioning Congress to approve. "We also have the need to make sure that we're getting the personnel that we have, and that requires us to be able to have the 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 that everybody gets overtime.' Because the men and women of the Secret Service right now, we are redlining them."
According to agency statistics, the Secret Service employs about 3,600 special agents, including 1,600 uniformed division officers and roughly 2,000 administrative and support personnel. Of the Department of Homeland Security's $64.81 billion total budget, the Secret Service in 2024 was allotted $3.27 billion — increasing less than $400,000 since 2022.
Secret Service agents "are rising to this moment," Rowe said, but "We have to have it every day. We cannot have failures. And in order to do that, we're going to have some hard conversations with Congress, and we're going to achieve that."
