Economist Chris Edwards notes that the “Secret Service has failed at its core mission in a stunning manner. Investigations into the assassination attempt on former President Trump are just beginning, but we’re already hearing some really lame excuses from federal officials. Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle’s claim about the sloped roof being unsafe is one of the most dubious defenses I’ve ever heard for a federal failure.”
Cheatle said Secret Service agents were not put on the roof where a shooter opened fire on Donald Trump, because that roof was sloped. That’s a bogus excuse, because many buildings with steeper slopes have had Secret Service agents stationed on them to prevent assassination attempts, without agents being harmed in the process. Indeed, the Secret Service’s own “sniper was on a sloped roof behind Trump,” showing that it’s safe to put agents on a sloped roof. And “the Secret Service officers who killed the assassin were on a different, sloped roof,” notes Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave.
As Chris Edwards points out,
Ten years ago, the Secret Service was embroiled in a different disastrous failure. As the media reported then, “a man carrying a knife was able to get inside the front door of the White House on Friday night after jumping a fence and sprinting more than 70 yards across the North Lawn.” One of the excuses at the time was underfunding, or a staffing shortage, as I discussed here.
If the administration uses that excuse this time, it would not be very convincing because the Secret Service budget has soared in recent years. The chart shows the agency’s total outlays since 2000. The 2024 figure is the administration estimate from March. I put the budget data in constant 2024 dollars using the budget deflator.
Secret Service real spending has grown from $2.34 billion in 2014 to $3.62 billion in 2024, which is a 55 percent increase in ten years. Again, those are inflation-adjusted dollars.
Federal government failure is endemic, and it is not for a lack of funding. I examine the real reasons in detail here.
The New York Post reported on the lapses by the Secret Service earlier:
Embattled Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle says she has no plans to resign, even after the stunning revelation that the agency decided not to guard the roof from which Thomas Crooks opened fire on former President Donald Trump because it was too slanted. “That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she told ABC News in a startling admission. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside,” she told the outlet.
Cheatle admitted the agency knew the building rooftop was a security vulnerability but still opted not to position agents there, leaving it wide open for Crooks to take up an ideal sniper perch with an unobstructed view of Trump on stage. From the roof, Crooks had a clear line of sight to the GOP nominee with his AR-style semiautomatic rifle, about 130 yards away.
Tactical operations experts were outraged by Cheatle’s explanation that the building’s slope was an insurmountable obstacle to properly securing the area. James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent and Army veteran, said he didn’t understand her reasoning. “You just have to work with the terrain you’re presented with,” Gagliano said….Doubters lambasted Cheatle for prioritizing woke “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives — like pledging to make the Secret Service 30% women by 2030 — over providing robust and effective security.
At the rally where Trump was shot at, one attendee was killed, and two others hospitalized after being shot by the would-be assassin.
Government spending has risen not only on the Secret Service, but also on the government as a whole, during the Biden administration, giving federal agencies much larger budgets. As Obama advisor Steven Rattner noted in the New York Times, the Biden administration has spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in inflation due to “too much money chasing too few goods.” President Biden’s big-spending ways caused inflation, according to even Democratic economists like Harvard’s Larry Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton.
