July 23, 2024 - 5:30pm
Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned today. The problem is that it took until now for her to do so: really, she should have stepped down in the days immediately following 13 July.
After all, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump earlier this month was an unforgivable failure of security. While Trump’s immediate protective detail and a supporting Secret Service counter-sniper team responded quickly and effectively to Thomas Crooks’s gunfire, the would-be assassin should never have been able to access the rooftop from which he launched his attack.
Appearing before Congress yesterday, Cheatle did not allay concerns over her agency’s performance. On the contrary, she offered very little new information about what had gone wrong, and at times appeared combative. She did not explain why Crooks was able to remain at large for an hour after he was first reported as behaving suspiciously, nor how the rooftop overlooking Trump was left unsecured. The result was a chorus of both Democratic and Republican voices calling for her immediate resignation.
Yet Cheatle’s failure went beyond her reluctance to take leadership responsibility for Trump’s near-miss. Since entering the director’s office in 2022, Cheatle has pursued policies which have failed to address the Secret Service’s endemic morale problems and its need to recruit and retain the very best.
One of her priorities in this regard has been her advancement of so-called “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility” initiatives. While Cheatle has rightly sought to address the Secret Service’s boys club culture, there is a broad perception within the federal law enforcement community that her policies have led to hiring and promotion decisions based more on an individual’s DEI compatibility than on merit. As Congress investigates the Secret Service’s wider culture and policies, internal hiring strategies and records are likely to come under significant scrutiny. Cheatle may have realised that getting out now was the best option to avoid the storm still to come.
Cheatle’s biggest problem, however, centres on her failure to stem the Secret Service’s notoriously high workforce attrition rate. Tasked with protecting 36 individuals around the clock and also keeping visiting heads of state and their spouses safe, the Secret Service asks a great deal of its employees. The agent community has therefore been particularly burdened by an increasingly heavy workload. Frequent short-notice trips away from family, long duty hours and a management culture that has traditionally revelled in making do with limited resources have all coalesced to undermine morale.
If there’s a main takeaway from her short time in office, it’s that Cheatle should have asked Congress for more money to hire personnel and for its support in altering who receives protection and why. She should have also focused on getting the best applicants into the Secret Service, rather than playing to Democratic Party identity politics. Unless the next director changes course, the deeper challenges facing this most important agency will remain unaddressed. And the risk of another 13 July incident will only grow.
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Subscribegiven the secret service is just another government mess up, and mess up is what government does, I suspect every other task secret service is assigned is as sloppy as the one in Butler. Butler difference is Tom Crooks and whoever else was shooting simply showed the rot in real time. When has the secret service ever been effective?
The real question is: who will appoint the next Secret Service head, and what will be the basis on which they’re appointed. Looks like Cheatle was appointed precisely because of her homage to DEI. If that doesn’t change, neither will the efficacy of the service.
The attempt on Trump’s life should serve as a warning shot to the whole principle of DEI hiring. Ultimately, the buck stops with the Commander in Chief. That explains the problem.
American institutions are crippled by woke nonsense A change of Director in one government agency, and perhaps a change of direction, is only a drop in a bucket that would take years to empty – even if the political will existed.
Tasked with protecting 36 individuals around the clock and also keeping visiting heads of state and their spouses safe, the Secret Service asks a great deal of its employees. The agent community has therefore been particularly burdened by an increasingly heavy workload. Frequent short-notice trips away from family, long duty hours and a management culture that has traditionally revelled in making do with limited resources have all coalesced to undermine morale.
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This paragraph confuses me.
He’s saying the workload’s highly unpredictable – resources are frequently chopped and changed at short notice, commensurate with a politician’s schedule as he or she reacts to events. You can’t work a 9-5 as a protection officer; this means accepting long and unpredictable hours, taking a toll (I imagine in a country as large as the USA it routinely involves long-distance travel) on family life. Divorce is endemic. The management culture comment alludes to the ‘can-do’ attitude common to law enforcement and military chiefs, whereby they uncomplainingly accept whatever the centre demands of them… except they aren’t the people putting the hours in, their staff are. Yet they get the promotions and to mess around with luxury belief nonsense like DEI.
The honourable response of the Director should have been to say that as Director I accept full responsibility and have accordingly resigned to enable a through independent investigation to take place to determine why the site the shooter selected was not properly occupied by an agent and why there was such a slow response to the threat once it had been identified and why unsuitably short agents had been assigned to protect the former President. Instead she simply sought to excuse and defend.
A fish rots from the head. The consistent claims that Biden was on top form when clearly his cognitive abilities were impaired simply encourages gaslighting right down the chain of command.
I think the concept of “honour” is now, sadly, considered ‘patriarchal’ and ‘white supremacist’, and therefore highly unlikely to be valued by someone like Kimberly Cheatle.
DHS should have given more of its money to the SS… some of the money it wastes housing and feeding etc. on unwanted border crossers and false refugees. Remember who Cheatle worked for, so now MyDorkus can answer the questions.
So, there was a problem that the service had too little diversity, and also problem that it had too much diversity?
I would have thought that such a service was crying out to be a boys club. But maybe that’s just old-fashioned me.
“While Cheatle has rightly sought to address the Secret Service’s boys club culture . . .”
Why “rightly” ? If men make the best Secret Service operatives, which I’m guessing, bar a few exceptions, they do, there is no necessity to address something that works.
“rightly” is an ideological assumption based on the unworkable fallacy of DEI, there’s nothing ‘right’ about it.
If it’s efficient leave the Secret Service to men, the “boys club”, and let them get on with it, or be ideological, have a quota of women and face up to failure and incompetence.
Fantastic! I was planning to post on this myself; but as soon as I came across yours I recognised you’d stated everything I felt about this stupid statement.
Exactly.
There is clearly demand for female SS operatives to protect females in close quarters, but that is it.
The idiocy of using small women as close protection for Trump was on display.
The Secret Service needs to be a “boys’ club”. It’s not a bad thing.
Resigned? So she keeps her, no doubt, inflated pension and emoluments. She should have been sacked, marched out of her office building with a bin bag, and then prosecuted. Properly.
A very timid piece.
The shortcomings were so catastrophically bad its hard to wonder whether or not she allowed this to happen. She refused multiple requests from Trump for more security, she clearly assigned the F team to his protection – how dumb do you have to be to put a clear sniper position “outside the zone”?
Her performance on Monday was deemed by many veteran watcher’s as the worst congressional witness testimony of all time; considering some of the people that testify in Congress that means she was apallingly awful.
No doubt that she will get a golden handshake and a rich contract from some Democrat firm, Google or Microsoft?, as a thank you note, immediately after the election.
The agent community. Dear God.
No doubt there are many problems in the USSS but DEI appears to be at the core of it. It is certainly the proximate reason for the Butler fiasco. If the top of an organisation is not right, the whole organisation will suffer.