Agency May Gain Clout After a Move to Planned Homeland Security Department
by Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
The prominence of the U.S. Secret Service, a Treasury Department law enforcement agency that enjoys lots of face time with the president -- while protecting his back -- stands to increase under President Bush’s proposed Department of Homeland Security.
The service has quietly expanded its capabilities in recent years to trace international financial crimes and cyberattacks on the nation’s financial infrastructure, extending its original mission to fight counterfeiters and protect the nation’s leaders. Now, in what some insiders consider a bureaucratic coup, a small agency that is often overshadowed by the FBI or dismissed as a “bodyguard” service would relocate, reporting directly to a secretary of homeland security at the president’s request.
A senior White House official said the rationale for moving the Secret Service into the Homeland Security Department is simple: As part of any heightened security plan, “they’ve got to protect the president and the vice president of the United States.”
But the Secret Service is evolving into more than a palace guard. Last year’s USA Patriot Act expanded its role in investigating electronic crime, now carried out through 135 U.S. offices and 19 abroad.
Since 1999, the service has deployed new technologies such as chemical and biological weapon sensors, and systems to rapidly detect similar symptoms of illness in large crowds at presidentially designated “National Special Security Events.” Such events have included presidential conventions, inaugurations, the 2002 Super Bowl and the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Secret Service is responsible for securing the events and coordinating federal, state and local law enforcement.
Its technicians help develop better-armored limousines, stronger bulletproof glass and hidden body armor. Its National Threat Assessment Center maintains a database on “all 83 persons known to have attacked, or come close to attacking” American leaders since 1950, Secret Service Director Brian L. Stafford has said.
“It makes sense that the Secret Service should be housed where the latest threat information and analysis is located,” says a White House briefing document about the Homeland Security Department.
The service’s move has spurred little public controversy, but there are quiet doubters. A few government veterans warn that other Treasury Department law enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- already “second-class citizens” in the policy-minded department -- will be more neglected while the Homeland Security Department burns time and energy on reorganizing. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and some financial investigators cautioned that the Secret Service’s role in defending the nation’s financial systems must not be “compromised or diluted.”
“I have yet to see or hear anything from the Treasury Department or administration that’s explained the value of it, a better product than we had before,” said a former Secret Service executive.
Another former senior federal law enforcement official said reorganizing alone will not improve how the agency does its jobs. “The problems are information flow and collaboration. And you don’t need to slide the box on a grid from Treasury to Homeland Security to do that.”
In the Senate, which will take up the president’s plan in September, the concern is not so much the Secret Service’s leaving, but who gets left behind. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) say ATF should also move.
“If ATF is left over at Treasury, is its mission going to be fully supported over there?” said a committee staffer. “The same rationale that makes it comfortable for the Secret Service to move makes it comfortable for ATF to move.”
But former Clinton deputy treasury secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat saw no structural problems, and Catherine A. Allen, head of the Financial Services Roundtable’s technology group, said she did not expect the Secret Service’s work with the industry to change.
The most immediate threat might be that the Secret Service is spread too thin. Attention to its personnel problems, which have burst into embarrassing view lately, could slip during the reorganization, along with accountability.
Since the September 1994 crash of a light plane on the White House South Lawn, sporadic shootings around the White House grounds and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the government has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars over the past four years to combat what Congress has called “staggering overtime levels” and “dramatic attrition.”
Since July 1998, the number of special agents has grown by 705, for a total of 2,939 -- a 32 percent increase. The service’s budget has exploded since 1999, growing 75 percent to a proposed $1.05 billion next year.
But the agency’s Washington-based Uniformed Division -- assigned the less glamorous duty of protecting government buildings and embassies -- has lost 16.9 percent of its officers since January. So far, 148 have left for the new federal Transportation Security Administration, leaving the force at 1,073, compared with its authorized level of 1,200.
Meanwhile, the agency’s workload has increased. After Sept. 11, the president increased the number of people provided with Secret Service protection from 17 to a peak of 38. It now guards 22. Average overtime is pushing more than 81 hours a month per agent.
“The Secret Service is an elite organization comprised of highly trained people,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the treasury and general government. “My hope would be as it’s brought into the homeland security organization that it does not lose its identity -- that it does not become part of such a large organization that they are not able to deal with their problems.”
As the service’s activities have grown with the rise of global terrorism and computer threats, so has scrutiny. A two-year-old class action by more than 50 African American current and former agents alleging discriminatory promotion practices is pending before U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. A February 2001 Treasury inspector general’s report faulted the Secret Service for resisting accountability, citing its failure to track certain misconduct allegations and its administering discipline inconsistently.
In June, U.S. News & World Report catalogued tawdry and sometimes illegal activities by Secret Service agents over 25 years, involving sex, drugs, theft, brawling, inebriation and corruption. Four agents assigned to Vice President Cheney fought in a San Diego bar, and agents on assignment at the Salt Lake City Olympics came under investigation about a possible sexual assault on a minor in February. Last month, an agent was suspended after he scrawled “Islam is evil, Christ is king” on a Muslim prayer calendar during a search of a Michigan suspect’s home.
Paul Irving, assistant director of the service, has said in a statement, “The Secret Service takes any allegations of breaches of professional conduct seriously and has a long history of addressing such issues.”