The Secret Service Shows The Way – Cleaning House

New Secret Service Director Sean Curran cleaned house on Friday. Ten senior officials in the agency were told to resign, retire, or face being reassigned. Curran is one of the Secret Service agents who surrounded Trump following the Butler assassination attempt. He is a career Secret Service agent with extensive experience in the Presidential Protective Division.

Curran’s action in making immediate changes to senior leadership in the Secret Service shows decisiveness. It also shows he understands the fundamental challenge that will face all of Trump’s appointees to positions heading law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A leadership change at the top will in and of itself fix nothing. These agencies have to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt.

We have a crisis of competency. The Secret Service demonstrated this to the entire world in Butler. An emotionally disturbed young man with a commonly available rifle and no training of any kind secured an elevated firing position within easy range of the stage on which Trump was speaking – in broad daylight – and nobody did anything about it until after he had come within a hair’s breadth of killing the man who is now President.

Did DEI initiatives play a role in that? Without question. Were there personnel on-site effectively masquerading as Secret Service who had no business being there? Certainly. But the list of failures on the part of the Secret Service on that one day alone is almost endless. A team of randomly selected local men from the surrounding area could have done a better job of protecting Trump than his “protective detail” did.

You don’t get to the point where such catastrophic failures are possible without years of rot. Standards have fallen. People who have no business doing so are serving on details. Training has been so diluted as to be virtually meaningless. During the second assassination attempt on Trump’s life, the Secret Service agent who discovered the would-be shooter fired 6 times from five feet away and could not hit his target. Is there a more basic skill for a member of a protective detail than the use of his firearm?

There is nothing unique about the Secret Service in this respect. The same issues run throughout all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Long before DEI began to run amok we were seeing what someone much more clever than I has referred to as “bureaucratic hardening of the arteries” in all of these organizations. Agencies that were once run by hard-charging, action-oriented individuals and laser-focused on mission accomplishment are now ponderous, risk-averse “self-licking ice cream cones” that generate endless process and entertain themselves all day with meetings and PowerPoint presentations.

Curran understands all this. He knows that he cannot simply sit down at his desk and start issuing orders to the same people who created the current nightmarish reality. He has to replace them. And, yet, as decisive as he has been what he has done so far has been the easy part.

If you have the political will breaking the china is relatively straightforward. It is what comes next that will pose the real challenge. Now Curran has to find ten people who are as capable as he is and as committed as he is to change, and those people have to have the skills and the experience to take over the Secret Service and fix it.

There is no downtime in which to do this. There are no admin days for the Secret Service. This is the ultimate “building an airplane in flight” experience.

The same will be true for every other law enforcement and intelligence agency in the federal government. Director Ratcliffe has just sat down in his chair at CIA. He has inherited an agency that is almost at a standstill operationally and whose senior managers were in many cases directly connected to what amounted to an attempted coup against Donald Trump in his first term. Issuing new marching orders to the same team and expecting a different result is a waste of time.

Kash Patel will face the same challenge at FBI, as will everyone else who takes over one of these agencies. Senior leaders will have to be replaced with people dedicated to reform and with the requisite levels of experience. Finding those people, the ones who not only want to fix things but know how to do so will be pivotal.

The right people with the right experience and the backing of the President can turn all this around and return our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to their former glory. Without them, we will all watch as what may be our last chance for meaningful reform is squandered.

The Secret Service has shown us the way. Now it’s up to all of Trump’s appointees to follow suit and do what is required to make sure Americans can sleep well in their beds at night.