The fallout from last month’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump continued to be felt on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, where two new bills were introduced proposing sweeping reforms to the Secret Service.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) introduced the Focus on Protection and AR-15 Perimeter Security Enhancement Acts in response to the events of the July 13 incident at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one bystander dead, two others seriously injured, and resulted in the death of gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.
The Focus on Protection Act would transfer the Secret Service’s authority to investigate financial crimes to the U.S. Treasury Department, potentially ending a mission that has been central to the agency’s operations since its founding in 1865. The agency could now focus its resources on providing protective services to the president, vice president, and others.
The AR-15 Perimeter Security Enhancement Act would require the head of the Secret Service to ensure that each security perimeter has a radius of at least 500 yards and is “consistent with the firing range of firearms likely to be used in an assassination.”
The law also requires the agency to secure all elevated positions from which a potential assassination attempt could be made, which are “any locations located above the primary security perimeter that provide a strategic advantage for attack, including rooftops, balconies, and elevated platforms.”
Torres said in a statement that appropriate legislation is needed to prevent another disaster like the one in Pennsylvania.
“If the former president had moved even a tiny bit, or if the shooter had aimed more precisely, the former president would have been assassinated,” he said. “The fact that we were inches away from a national disaster is a crisis in itself. We owe it to the American people to identify the security failures that led to the attempted assassination and then prevent those mistakes from being repeated in the future.”
The Secret Service has come under intense scrutiny since the assassination, particularly from Congress. USSS Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on July 23 under pressure from the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
A week later, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) announced the creation of a 13-member bipartisan task force to investigate the incident.
However, Torres also pointed out that the Secret Service has recently been so short of resources that it is difficult for it to fulfill its extensive mission.
Agency leaders acknowledge that resource constraints have arisen since federal budget cuts in 2013, although budgets have improved in recent years. However, difficulties in recruiting staff remain.
For these reasons, it is necessary to reduce the scope of the Secret Service’s duties and thus give it the ability to uncover financial crimes, Torres said.
“The Secret Service is responsible not only for protecting the president, but also for enforcing financial law, which is a relic of the 19th century,” he said. “In my view, it should be focused exclusively on protecting the president, and we need legislation that moves financial law enforcement from the Secret Service to the Treasury Department – exactly where it belongs.”
Anthony Guglielmi, USSS communications director, said in an email to Government Executive that the agency does not discuss legislative proposals, but added that its investigative and protection missions are “closely intertwined.”
“Our agents learn skills essential to our protective operations, such as threat detection, analysis and critical systems security, while working on criminal investigations. Likewise, the U.S. Secret Service’s domestic and international field offices are not only used as a network to conduct criminal investigations, but also facilitate protective visits and detect threats against our protected individuals,” he said. “The U.S. Secret Service’s investigative mission strengthens our protective operations, and our agents are most successful when they can gain experience and learn from both missions.”
The Focus on Protection Act was referred to the House Judiciary, Financial Services, and Appropriations committees, while the AR-15 Perimeter Security Enhancement Act was referred to the Judiciary Committee.
