A day after the second armed assassin in two months got uncomfortably close to executing former President Donald Trump, the Secret Service is rethinking its approach to protecting current and former Presidents, the head of the agency said Monday.
“We need to get out of a reactive model and get into a readiness model,” acting director Ronald L. Rowe, Jr. told reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday, as he acknowledged that the storied agency is stretched thin during a busy campaign season.
The Secret Service’s most well-known mission is to protect the country’s current and former Presidents, and presidential candidates. But for years, the agency has been plagued by insufficient budgets, understaffing, antiquated technology, and scandal—such as when a Secret Service detail scouting for a trip by President Obama to Cartagena, Colombia, was caught bringing prostitutes back to their hotel rooms.
Now lawmakers are openly asking whether the Secret Service has assigned enough agents to Trump’s detail after two failed assassination attempts.
Some critics have speculated that the Biden administration was purposely depriving Trump of enough Secret Service protection. That’s not the case at all, says Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, the top Democrat in the bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler.
“The sitting president and both candidates are receiving the same level of Secret Service security protection,” says Crow. But he adds that the agency is being asked to do more than ever before, leaving agents overworked and undermining the agency’s “level of readiness.”
“We’re asking a lot of the agents of the Secret Service, and there’s no doubt in my mind that we need to give them additional resources, additional staffing, to do what we’re asking them to do,” says Crow.
Rowe said that the Secret Service has “done more with less for decades” and at the moment the men and women of the Secret Service…
