Butler One Year Later: Secret Service Makes Changes, Talks Lessons Learned
A series of reports is looking at some of the failures and some of the changes made by the U.S. Secret Service (USSS), one year after the assassination attempt against President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), found that senior level USSS officials received classified intelligence regarding a threat to President Trump’s life ten days before the rally, but failed to relay the information to federal and local law enforcement personnel responsible for securing and staffing the event.
The report also “exposes a litany of USSS procedural and planning errors, including misallocation of resources, lack of training and pervasive communication failures, all of which contributed to an unsecure environment.”
This comes as six Secret Service agents were suspended without pay for their actions in the run up to the Butler event. The suspensions include supervisors and line agents and ranged from ten to 42 days.
Deputy Secret Service Director Matt Quinn told CBS that the suspensions, not firings, are the way forward for the agency.
"We aren't going to fire our way out of this," said Quinn. "We're going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation."
Secret Service Details Changes
Meanwhile, the USSS itself released details on how the agency has changed in the past year.
USSS writes that it “took a serious look at our operations, reviewed the recommendations made by external oversight bodies and subsequently implemented numerous operational, policy and organizational reforms.”
Out of the 46 recommendations made by Congressional oversight bodies, the Secret Service implemented 21 so far, with 16 others currently in progress and nine are addressed to other stakeholders.
Recommendations implemented include the following:
Improve coordination and specify responsibilities among federal, state and local law enforcement partners.
Require advance planning leads to request and review state and local operational plans ahead of an event
Designate a specific individual responsible for approving all plans, including the responsibility for approving security perimeters, before an event
Consolidate operation plans
Provide a unified briefing and hold mandatory pre-event meetings
Establish a hierarchy for communication pre-event
Recommendations pending include:
Improving mitigation strategies for when drone systems fail
Ensuring that drone operators have proper training and certifications
Assessing already-available technology and examine ways to utilize it to improve operations
Providing a more defined training curriculum
More Hiring on the Way
Meanwhile the USSS is receiving an extra $1.2 billion from the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill. The agency can use the funds for hiring, and performance, retention and signing bonuses.
USSS says that following a recruitment campaign that included an ad during the Super Bowl, the agency reported a significant uptick in applications, with more than 22,000 people applying between January 20 and May 1, compared with 7,000 the same period in 2024.