Secret Service Reassesses Protection Measures After Recent Threats

The Secret Service is re-evaluating its methods for safeguarding current and former Presidents following two recent incidents where armed individuals came close to harming former President Donald Trump, the agency’s acting director said Monday. 

“We need to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one,” acting director Ronald L. Rowe, Jr. told reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday, acknowledging the Secret Service is strained during the busy campaign season.

The Secret Service’s most well-known duty is to protect the current and former Presidents, along with presidential candidates. However, the agency has faced challenges for years, including inadequate budgets, staffing shortages, outdated technology, and scandals – such as the incident where a Secret Service detail scouting for President Obama’s trip to Cartagena, Colombia, was found to have brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms.

Now, lawmakers are questioning whether the Secret Service has allocated enough agents to Trump’s security detail after two failed assassination attempts.

Some critics have speculated that the Biden administration has intentionally reduced Trump’s Secret Service protection. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, the leading Democrat on the bipartisan task force investigating the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, refutes this claim.

“The current president and both candidates are receiving the same level of Secret Service security protection,” says Crow. But he adds that the agency is facing more demands than ever before, leading to overworked agents and a weakened “level of readiness” for the agency.

“We’re placing a heavy burden on the Secret Service agents, and I have no doubt that we need to provide them with additional resources and staffing to fulfill their duties,” says Crow.

Rowe said that the Secret Service has “operated with limited resources for decades” and that at this time, the agency’s agents are working excessive overtime shifts. “We are pushing them to their limits,” Rowe said.

While Trump was on the fifth hole of his golf course Sunday afternoon, Trump’s security detail noticed a man in the trees along the fence line near the sixth green and opened fire on him, Rowe said. Officers found a cell phone and a loaded SKS-style rifle with a scope at the scene and ultimately apprehended Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, who was charged with gun crimes in federal court on Monday. Cell phone records indicate Routh was in the area for almost 12 hours, according to investigators.

Rowe said Monday that the Secret Service was unable to inspect the course beforehand because the golfing visit wasn’t on Trump’s official schedule, meaning that Trump had not given the Secret Service much advance notice before going to the course. “The President wasn’t supposed to be there,” Rowe said. The Secret Service implemented their “emergency plan based on our tactical assets” and “that security plan worked,” he said.

To address the new level of threats, Rowe said he has “ordered a paradigm shift.” The methods used to protect current and former Presidents and presidential candidates were effective on Sunday, but failed to prevent a would-be assassin from firing off a barrage of bullets in Butler that killed one rally attendee and came close to taking Trump’s life.

The Secret Service is facing a “dynamic threat environment,” Rowe said. That necessitates a larger pool of trained agents who are ready to be deployed before the unforeseen happens.

President Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday that he supports increased funding and agents for the Secret Service. “The Service needs more help. I think the Congress should respond to their needs, if they, in fact, need more Service people,” Biden said.

The number of federal agents required by the Secret Service rises during campaign seasons, as it must safeguard candidates for President and Vice President, as well as protect large complex events like the party conventions. At the same time, the Service has to guard a significant number of former Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump.

When the agency needs to, it draws on federal law enforcement officers from other federal agencies like Homeland Security Investigations, the Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

“We’re in an era right now where there are a lot of demands” on the Secret Service, says John Sandweg, a former acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees the Secret Service. On top of that, Trump is a “lightning rod,” notes Sandweg. “Trump being Trump clearly requires a much greater share of resources than other former presidents,” he says.

Sandweg says Congress should explore whatever creative funding ideas it needs to so that the agency can “build a surge capacity” from within a cadre of special agents that are trained for this work.