Former House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz laid out six recommendations to fix the United States Secret Service more than ten years ago. Not one of them stuck. Now, after a string of security failures culminating in multiple attempts on President Donald Trump's life, a bipartisan pair of lawmakers wants to rip the agency out of the Department of Homeland Security entirely and place it directly under the White House.

The timeline is damning on its own terms. In 2015, Chaffetz's committee analyzed more than 100 separate security incidents around the globe and declared the Secret Service "an agency in crisis." The panel identified persistent staffing shortages, inadequate security clearance screening, communication breakdowns, and a mission split between presidential protection and financial-crimes investigation that left neither job done well. The committee urged the president to consider appointing an outsider to lead the agency.

A decade passed. The staffing shortages remained. The communication failures remained. And a president got shot.

Butler, Pennsylvania, and the cost of inaction

On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was struck by a bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A congressional panel reviewing the incident found that failures in "planning, execution, and leadership" had "undermined the effectiveness of the human and material assets deployed that day." The panel identified communication breakdowns between agents that hampered response times, the same category of problem Chaffetz's committee had flagged nine years earlier.

Chaffetz, the former Republican congressman from Utah, did not mince words about what followed. He told Just the News:

"I thought when Donald Trump got shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, you know, a President of the United States is shot. He's down on the ground. He's bleeding. Thank goodness he survived and is doing fine. Now, every single one of the agents that were involved and engaged in that, every one of the people at the Secret Service, got a promotion."

No agents were terminated. No supervisors lost their positions. A president was shot, and the institutional response was to hand out promotions.

"Nobody was fired. A president was shot," Chaffetz said. "How do those people keep their jobs?"

He called the "lack of accountability" the "most disappointing" part of the agency's failure to reform. That assessment is hard to argue with when you lay the record end to end. The 2015 report warned of crisis. The agency did not change course. The Homeland Security Inspector General separately warned that staffing shortages were plaguing Secret Service counter-sniper teams. Then came Butler.

A pattern that keeps repeating

The problems Chaffetz identified in 2015 were not abstract. His committee's investigation followed waves of security failures, including a 2011 White House shooting. And the operational breakdowns extended beyond the field. As the Washington Examiner reported, Chaffetz publicly showed video of two senior Secret Service agents in a government SUV entering a restricted area where officers were investigating a possible bomb outside the White House, after the agents had allegedly been drinking at a retirement party. A supervisor reportedly overruled lower-level officers who wanted to administer sobriety tests. In that same incident, 17 minutes of pedestrian and vehicle traffic continued near the suspicious package, and officers followed the wrong suspect vehicle.

Chaffetz accused Secret Service leadership at the time of keeping Congress in the dark. "By refusing to allow the witnesses Director Clancy is keeping Congress and the American public in the dark," he said.

That culture of evasion is what makes the agency's post-Butler response so predictable. The pattern is consistent: failure, investigation, recommendations, silence, and then another failure. The 2015 report gathered dust. The Butler review found the same problems. And the threats keep coming.

The article references what it describes as now three attempts on Donald Trump's life. The most recent incident involved an armed suspect near the White House, defendant Cole Allen, who was charged with attempted assassination after allegedly breaching a security checkpoint and shooting at Secret Service agents, hitting one in what was described as a non-fatal impact.

That breach occurred in connection with the White House Correspondents' dinner last week, adding another entry to a growing list of perimeter security failures at the executive mansion. Forensic evidence tied the suspect's weapon to the impact on an agent's vest, underscoring just how close the encounter came to a far worse outcome.

New legislation aims to cut the bureaucracy

On Thursday, Reps. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, and Russell Fry, a South Carolina Republican, introduced legislation that would transfer the Secret Service from DHS directly to the White House. The bill would also make FEMA a cabinet-level agency and shift the Transportation Security Administration from DHS to the Transportation Department.

Moskowitz, who served on the congressional panel reviewing the Butler assassination attempt, said the experience opened his eyes to a structural problem that went beyond any single failure.

"Going to Butler, talking to Secret Service, is when I realized, well, the Secret Service is suffering the same problems that FEMA is suffering. Because they were such a small agency, they couldn't get the resources they needed. They couldn't get decisions being made."

The logic is straightforward. The Secret Service sits inside a sprawling department alongside dozens of other agencies. It competes for resources, attention, and decision-making authority with entities that have nothing to do with presidential protection. Moskowitz argued the legislation would "cut a lot of the bureaucracy we're getting at DHS."

House Republicans appear to be moving forward with at least one of Chaffetz's original key recommendations: splitting the Secret Service to focus on its core protective mission. Whether the full package of reforms gains traction remains to be seen, but the bipartisan sponsorship, a Democrat and a Republican, suggests the failures have become too glaring to ignore along purely partisan lines.

The calls for a Secret Service overhaul have grown louder from leadership in both chambers, and for good reason. The agency's track record over the past decade reads like a case study in institutional resistance to reform.

Security theater vs. security

Chaffetz offered a blunt summary of where the agency stands today:

"I'm sad to say, I think a lot of what Secret Service does, there are some heroic people, no doubt about it, and they do some things very well, but a lot of it is security theater, and a lot of it is they have a real issue, and they have got to fix things again."

That phrase, "security theater", cuts to the heart of the matter. The agency maintains the appearance of impenetrable protection while the underlying systems remain broken. Staffing gaps persist. Communication chains fail under pressure. And when things go wrong, nobody loses a job.

"There's six key components that I recommended fixing, but 10 years gone by, and quite honestly, nothing has changed," Chaffetz said.

The specific components of those six recommendations are not detailed in the public record cited here, but the broad categories, staffing, screening, communication, mission focus, leadership, and accountability, have surfaced again and again in every subsequent review. The recurring breaches at the White House perimeter alone suggest that whatever internal reforms the agency claims to have adopted have not translated into results on the ground.

The question now is whether this latest round of legislation will produce structural change or simply generate another set of recommendations for the next Congress to rediscover after the next failure. The Moskowitz-Fry bill at least addresses the bureaucratic layering that multiple investigations have identified as a drag on the agency's effectiveness. Removing the Secret Service from DHS and placing it under direct White House authority would shorten the chain of command and eliminate the resource competition that Moskowitz described.

Accountability remains the missing piece

But structural reorganization alone will not solve the deeper problem Chaffetz identified: a culture that rewards failure and punishes no one. An agency where a president can be shot and every agent involved receives a promotion is an agency that has lost any meaningful connection between performance and consequences.

The men and women who put themselves between a bullet and a president deserve better leadership than that. So do the taxpayers who fund the agency and the public officials who depend on it. And so does a country that has now watched the same preventable failures play out across a full decade.

Congress told the Secret Service to change in 2015. The agency chose not to listen. The bill for that choice keeps coming due, and the people paying it are not the ones who ignored the warnings.