The Secret Service’s failure to prevent the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is prompting calls to overhaul the troubled agency, including a fresh push to divorce it from the Department of Homeland Security.
The elite group of agents charged with protecting political leaders has long resented its placement in the behemoth department created after the 9/11 attacks. The security lapses at the July 13 campaign rally where Trump was injured provide the latest fuel for arguments against the arrangement.
“They don’t need to be part of a huge, unmanageable bureaucracy, which is what I would say describes the Department of Homeland Security these days,” Sen.
The new push to rehome the Secret Service is in early stages but likely will gain momentum as Senate committees and a House task force investigate the security lapses surrounding the assassination attempt and craft recommendations to guard against future failures.
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Proponents of the shift say the 7,000-person agency could get more support and priority in the Treasury Department, where it originated in 1865 to fight counterfeiting. Skeptics warn that an organizational shuffle may just create bureaucratic headaches when the service has more urgent vulnerabilities to address.
“It is a distraction given what they’ve got on their plate right now,” said Chris Cummiskey, a senior DHS management official during the Obama administration.
‘Fresh Start’
Moving the Secret Service out of DHS would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it before.
The last serious push was in 2020, when the Trump administration used a budget proposal to pitch transferring the Secret Service from DHS to Treasury. Bipartisan coalitions in the House and Senate proposed legislation (
The plan stalled, the 116th Congress came to a close, and the conversation fizzled. Rep.
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“It made sense to me then, it makes sense to me now,” Sen.
Cornyn, a cosponsor in 2020, pushed the idea during a July 30 press conference following the Senate’s first hearing examining the security lapses at the Trump rally. He panned DHS as dysfunctional — the sprawling agency has disparate missions and consistently low morale, though it’s improved slightly in recent years — and said the Secret Service’s work doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
The lead Democratic cosponsor of the 2020 bill, Sen.
Representatives for Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to questions about whether he would again support excising the Secret Service from DHS if he returns to the White House.
Lost in DHS?
Many former Secret Service agents agree that the post-9/11 move to DHS — which promised greater resources and access to personnel — didn’t work out as planned.
“I thought ‘This is great, we’re going to go to this giant new department, we’re going to have a better budget, we’re going to have more manpower,’” said Jeff James, an agent with the service from 1996 to 2018 who now runs his own security consulting firm. “And really none of that ever happened.”
The agency has seen its budget grow through the years but has also seen its portfolio swell to include broader financial crimes and cybersecurity work. Lawmakers are investigating whether resource constraints played into the security lapses at the Trump rally.
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Proponents of moving the service to Treasury say the shift would ensure agency leaders and congressional liaisons make its budget and personnel needs a priority. DHS is more than double the size of Treasury by workforce size and is saddled with a near-constant set of crises involving natural disasters, border security, and other high-profile areas of the department’s work.
“The problem historically with Homeland Security had been Homeland Security’s priorities have been immigration, borders, planes,” said Donald Mihalek, a retired senior agent for the Secret Service.
Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe maintained in a recent Senate hearing that the agency has “a great relationship” with DHS and hasn’t felt constrained in pushing for more resources. He’s deflected when asked whether the service would fit better in a different department.
“It probably needs to be in the Department of Homeland Security until Congress or others have an opportunity to weigh in,” Rowe said at an Aug. 2 press briefing.
‘Twist Yourself Into a Pretzel’
Many lawmakers and former officials aren’t convinced moving the Secret Service to a different department would solve its problems. The diversity of its missions doesn’t lend itself to an obvious match.
“You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to come up with which one’s the right fit,” said The Heritage Foundation’s Lora Ries, a senior official at the department under Trump and former President George W. Bush.
Ries cited a series of recent years’ failures within the Secret Service, including White House intruders, a prostitution scandal in Colombia, security lapses on Jan. 6, 2021, and the deletion of text messages related to that day’s events as symptoms of more urgent problems.
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“It’s worth a conversation, but that doesn’t solve the problem,” said Sen.
Committee Chairman
Ries and other former DHS and Secret Service officials recommend the agency look at refining its mission to ensure it isn’t stretched too thin. James, one of the former agents, said the service could improve its protective work by cutting out its mission to investigate financial crimes. Rowe has strongly pushed back on that idea, telling reporters the investigative work is “in our DNA.”
‘First Domino’
Former homeland security officials caution that moving the Secret Service could create new problems for the agency.
Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior DHS official, argued that the service suffers from being “too insular” and would exacerbate that dynamic at Treasury, where they’d be an elite law enforcement team among “a group of green-eyeshade economists.”
DHS would also pay a price. Many of the agencies that were pushed together to create the department in 2003—such as the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency—have been itching to get out since the beginning.
“If Secret Service moves,” Rosenzweig said, “it’s the first domino.”
Richard Staropoli, a former DHS chief information officer who spent nearly three decades as a Secret Service agent, argued that the assassination attempt showed the importance of addressing what he sees as the agency’s misplacement in DHS.
“This could happen tomorrow,” he said of another security threat. “Given that potential, it probably is worth the effort.”