Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, the Government Accountability Office added improving the training of Secret Service agents to its list of priority recommendations for the Department of Homeland Security.

On August 19, Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas highlighting which of the department’s 478 unmet GAO recommendations should be prioritized for implementation.

“In light of recent events, DHS should ensure that special agents assigned to the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Division (PPD) and Vice Presidential Protective Division (VPD) meet their annual training objectives given current and projected staffing levels,” Dodaro wrote. “Developing and implementing a plan to meet protection-related training objectives would better prepare special agents to respond effectively to the security threats facing the President and other protected individuals.”

A DHS panel created after an intruder jumped a fence into the White House in 2014 recommended that special agents protecting the president and vice president should spend 25 percent of their time on training.

However, when GAO first made this recommendation in 2019, it found that PPD and VPD special agents attended training for 5.9% and 2.9% of their regular work hours, respectively, in fiscal year 2018.

In 2021, the Secret Service set a goal that special agents assigned to the President and Vice President should spend approximately 12% of their time in training, a goal to be achieved in fiscal year 2025.

But in 2023, the protection agency pushed back this target date to 2027, saying it needed to secure funding for additional staff to provide more time for training.

Matthew Noyes, director of cyber policy and strategy for the Secret Service’s Office of Investigations, said at the Aspen Security Forum in July that the agency has struggled to maintain staffing levels for a decade due to government-wide budget caps first implemented in 2013.

The Secret Service received $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2024, a 9% increase over the previous year.

Shortly after the attack, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned amid bipartisan criticism of her agency’s handling of the rally, where a gunman killed one attendee, injured two others and grazed Trump’s ear. Numerous congressional committees, a bipartisan House task force, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and an independent commission of inquiry overseen by the department are investigating the Secret Service’s actions that day.

Other GAO recommendations on the open priorities list include that DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services should close gaps in information sharing to ensure that the Office of Refugee Resettlement receives the information necessary to make decisions for unaccompanied migrant children. Additionally, the department should work with the FBI to evaluate existing agreements on joint initiatives to combat domestic terrorist threats.

GAO found that DHS has implemented 16 recommendations on the priority list since June 2023. For example, FEMA took steps to assess how effectively its disaster response forces were deployed to meet mission needs on the ground, and DHS improved the way it serves families on the southwest border.