An exodus of agents left the Secret Service unprepared for 2024

WASHINGTON — In November, Michael Ebey, a Secret Service special agent, found himself working another 12-hour shift. Like so many before, it was grueling.

This time, he was part of the detail providing protection for President Joe Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Pangs of fatigue snaked up his legs from hours of standing on a concrete floor of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, about 3,000 miles from his home.

“I got to the point where I just said, ‘You know, I don’t think I want to do it anymore.’” Ebey put in his papers to retire in January. He was 52 years old.

For months, alarm had been spreading through the executive offices on the eighth floor of the Secret Service headquarters in Washington over the flight of experienced talent like Ebey.

The agency knew it would face an avalanche in 2024. There would be presidential campaigns. Political conventions. A NATO summit. It was looking to be one of the busiest years in the Secret Service’s recent history, even as threats of violence against political leaders were rising.

The service was not ready.

“Now more than ever, it is critical that we retain employees,” Kimberly A. Cheatle, the Secret Service director at the time, wrote in an agencywide email in July 2023.

But instead of growing as the big year approached, the service shrank. At least 1,400 of its 7,800 employees left in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, the largest outflow from the agency in at least two decades, federal data show.

This summer, two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump revealed deep problems in the Secret Service. Failures in technology meant a would-be assassin was able to use a drone for surveillance. Failures in command meant a nearby rooftop was left unprotected for him to climb. Failures in communication meant he was able to fire, even after being spotted.

But agents say one problem underlies all the others: an exodus of the best-trained people.

Their departures, partly rooted in long-standing failures by Secret Service management, have left agents in a kind of permanent state of emergency, lacking the focus, rest and training necessary to do their jobs well, more than two dozen current and former employees told The New York Times.

Among the reasons they leave:

— Crushing amounts of overtime work, often assigned at the last minute and sometimes without pay.

— An initiative to rehire retired Secret Service agents, which backfired by spurring more employees to retire so they could be paid a salary and a pension at once.

— Perceptions of favoritism in promotions and hiring, including an episode in which the agency’s chief uniformed officer moonlighted as a real estate agent for subordinates, who then won promotions.

— Unheeded pleas from agents to rapidly embrace new technology like drones that could improve protection efforts and ease the workload.

The loss of so many valuable agents might be less of a crisis if enough people — and the right people — were ready and waiting to take their place. But management had not solved that problem either.

Recruiting standards slumped, longtime agents said, as the agency ushered more people in the door. Training, which takes years to adequately prepare a new hire to protect a president under the best of circumstances, was slowed by a decrepit facility where the fight-training room flooded during downpours.

The Secret Service and top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees it, acknowledged some of the problems and said in interviews that they were taking them seriously.

Ronald L. Rowe Jr., the service’s acting director, said the agency needed to rapidly expand the number of trained agents, including sharpshooters and other gun carriers, and acquire more advanced technology to confront growing threats from domestic and foreign actors.

“That all goes back to trying to be responsive to this hyper-dynamic threat environment by which we are operating,” Rowe said last month at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, traditionally one of the Secret Service’s biggest challenges. In addition to protecting the president, the vice president, presidential candidates and their families, the agency must also protect visiting world leaders.

The Secret Service has managed to hire enough agents in recent months that the workforce is growing again. Congress last month also allotted an additional $231 million to cover overtime and other costs for special agents and to acquire more drones, among other equipment.

But dozens of current and former agents told the Times that the agency was still far from solving the underlying problem. Even agents willing to take a bullet for the president were often unwilling to tolerate life at the agency that protects him.

“You ride your horse until it dies, and then you eat it,” Jonathan Wackrow, who spent 14 years at the Secret Service, said of management’s view of the workforce. “That’s not a business model that any organization should have.”

‘Looking for bodies’

Christopher McClenic grew up on Long Island, New York, idolizing a neighbor who was a Secret Service agent. After a dozen years as a police officer, McClenic joined the service in 2001.

“The mystique involved in this job — protecting the president of the United States — it just piqued my interest too much,” he said.

McClenic kept watch over former President Bill Clinton full time. Later, he was transferred to Miami and assigned to cyber and financial fraud cases, another of the agency’s roles.

But even then, he was required to help with protective duty during busy times. He missed weeks with his family, as short-handed bosses would come to agents saying, “We’re looking for bodies,” to protect one leader or another, including Trump.

Like Ebey, McClenic can recount the moment he knew he had enough. For him, it was the night when, at age 55, he was lying on the floor of a military cargo plane headed to Asia. He was trying to sleep underneath the chains that were holding in place Trump’s bulletproof limousine.

“I’m getting the heck out of here,” McClenic said he remembered thinking. He resigned two years before the mandatory retirement age of 57.

The service had struggled with this problem — overwork causing departures, causing more overwork — for at least a decade.

While some junior officers were eligible for extra pay, at time-and-a-half, more senior officers like McClenic earned only their regular hourly wage for additional time.

Even worse, because of a federal salary cap, many officers received no additional pay at all after a certain point, meaning their overtime hours were worked for free.

Congress moved to address the problem, passing legislation in 2016 that raised the pay cap for agents on protective details, with the maximum compensation as of 2024 set at $221,145.

But some agents were forced to work so much overtime that they still reached the new, higher pay cap. The agents involved acknowledged this was generous pay. But still, once they hit this higher cap, they found themselves working for free again.

One Boston-based agent said he had worked more than 600 hours of overtime as of mid-September, slamming into the pay cap.

The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association conducted a survey last month of Secret Service agents at the request of the Times: 68 of the 153 agents who responded reported that they had “maxed out” last year, missing as much as $30,000 in overtime.

“Imagine if Amazon told their drivers, ‘You guys are going to work 70 hours a week, but we’re only going to pay you for 30 hours a week; suck it up,’” said Mathew Silverman, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, echoing comments from the special agent in Boston, who was not authorized by the agency to speak publicly.

Despite the service’s workload, the Department of Homeland Security sent an email in August 2021 asking Secret Service personnel to volunteer for an extra assignment: guarding the U.S. border with Mexico.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, defended the practice. The Secret Service itself often asks for volunteers from other parts of the same department to help at its largest events, he said. The service recruits Transportation Security Administration officers, for instance, to run metal detectors at big political rallies.

“The Secret Service does the very same thing,” Mayorkas said. But Secret Service agents said the request seemed tone-deaf, since they felt more overstretched than other parts of the Homeland Security Department.

The years leading up to 2024 were supposed to be a period of growth: Secret Service leaders had asked Congress for tens of millions in increased funding to increase its overall staff to 8,305.

They got the money. But they did not grow.

Instead, agents responded to their conditions by voting with their feet: 283 Secret Service employees quit, 308 retired, and another 169 accepted jobs at other federal agencies in 2022, data show.

The Secret Service was losing full-time staff members at a far faster rate than several other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, according to data analysis for the Times by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group.

‘Nepotism, favoritism, corruption’

A series of management failures undermined efforts to bring in new agents.

One mistake started with a simple-sounding plan: Why not just hire back agents who had retired?

With funding from Congress, the service about a decade ago began to offer retirees a sweet deal: Keep your pension, but come back and collect a salary on top of it.

It backfired.

The prospect of two incomes was so attractive that it led more agents to retire, Secret Service officials acknowledge. First, the agents disappeared from the workforce for months, using stored-up vacation days and waiting for retirement papers to be processed.

Then, when they returned, supervisors often sent the so-called rehired annuitants to work desk jobs, far from the protective assignments the agency most needed to fill, according to four former officials.

Agency bosses, appalled at the consequences of their program, tried to fix it. After Cheatle took over the agency in 2022, she moved to cut the pay that certain new participants could receive to reduce the incentive for them to retire early. And she ordered closer supervision of how the rehired agents were being assigned.

The agency also faced a disillusioned workforce, with the widespread perception that the promotion system was at times driven more by personal connections than merit.

One high-profile case particularly rankled. In 2019, a Secret Service veteran named Alfonso M. Dyson became the second-in-command of the uniformed division, whose officers guard the White House in police-style gear.

While in that job, Dyson also moonlighted as a real estate agent in Maryland. Records show he represented at least three of his subordinates in buying or selling homes.

Dyson was promoted in January 2022, becoming chief of the uniformed division. After that, two of his subordinates who were former real estate clients were promoted, according to Secret Service records. Promotions are supposed to be based on merit, but the chief helps pick officers who receive them.

Officers joked that they should have moved faster to buy a house through Dyson.

Dyson, who retired last year, declined to answer detailed questions from the Times. “I have no comment other than to wish those who are dedicated to the mission the best,” he wrote in an email.

Rowe said the department’s inspector general was asked to review the matter. The inspector general declined to comment.

“Nepotism, favoritism, corruption — that is part of our culture here,” said Louis Fitzig, who retired from the agency this year after filing a claim asserting that he was unfairly denied a promotion. (That case has been settled.)

Failed workarounds

In the past year, the Secret Service has slowly begun to build up its staff.

Cheatle took a number of steps to try to retain employees, including enhancing subsidized child care and offering bonuses to more senior agents and officers if they committed to remaining after they were eligible for retirement.

By this summer, the service had reached 8,100 employees, its highest level ever.

However, that total is still below what the agency said it would reach by 2023 and much lower than the roughly 10,000 employees officials say they need by 2026 to run the agency smoothly, without constant emergency requests for overtime work.

But even the rank and file who remain often feel ill-equipped to perform their duties. They train in dilapidated facilities. They pine for modern technology that would ease their load. And even when they get new equipment, they are often not properly trained on how to use it.

On July 13, when Thomas Crooks fired at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, even basic radios were unreliable.

“I think my radio is screwed up of course,” a Secret Service employee texted two other agents on the day of the rally.

The radio problems had lingered, even though a decade ago, they had been blamed, in part, for why an intruder was able to jump the White House fence and get inside the mansion before being detected.

In October 2021, two agency staff members sent a confidential memo to top Secret Service officials urging the creation of a specialized drone unit that would accompany presidential protectees the way countersniper units do. This aerial reconnaissance team would be trained to use drones to provide the Secret Service a live overview with which to detect hostile forces and threats.

But the Secret Service moved slowly to embrace such a plan. In Butler, the would-be assassin had a drone, but the service did not. Only now is the agency moving to broadly build out the drone team.

© 2024 The New York Times Company