The Secret Service Risked ‘Mission Effectiveness’ with Understaffing, Watchdog Says

The Secret Service was understaffed by more than 20% when a gunman tried to kill then-candidate Donald Trump at a 2024 campaign rally in Pennsylvania, and agents missed multiple opportunities to disrupt the attack, according to a pair of inspector general reports released Thursday.

The reports also found that the service lacked an effective system for carrying out protective operations, often relying on informal planning at public events — gaps that contributed to the service’s failure to protect Trump and bystanders during the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt.

The findings mirror many of the conclusions reached by congressional panels, federal investigators and outside experts in separate reviews of the shooting. And while the reports offer few new revelations about the Secret Service’s shortcomings in the lead-up to the attack, they reinforce longstanding concerns that the agency lacked the staffing and resources needed to fulfill its zero-fail mission.

The Secret Service agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations in both reports, many of which had been identified in previous internal and external probes.

“The U.S. Secret Service today is a stronger and more capable agency than it was in 2024, thanks in part to significant institutional reforms and investments in technology, personnel, and protective operations,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement Thursday.

The spokesperson said the service had prioritized hiring and retaining agents and officers and had accelerated its onboarding process. The agency disclosed earlier this year that it was aiming to expand its staff by about a fifth by 2028, a year in which the service expects to face an unprecedented workload due to the presidential election, the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and other major events.

The shooting by Thomas Matthew Crooks at a fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, marked the first time a current or former president had been fired upon since the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Crooks fired multiple shots from a rooftop with a clear line of sight to the stage where Trump was speaking before being killed by one of the service’s countersnipers. Trump and two bystanders were injured, and a third attendee was killed.

One of the reports focused specifically on workforce issues and security planning, highlighting numerous deficiencies that investigators said had jeopardized the service’s protective operations.

According to the report, the service was understaffed by an average of 21.4 percent in 2023 and 2024. The agency was authorized for roughly 10,000 positions in those years but had only filled about 8,000 of them. The Office of Protective Operations, which oversees the service’s core mission, was understaffed by 16 percent in 2024, the report found.

The shortages created a host of problems, investigators said, with agent burnout chief among them. The report said the service had relied increasingly on excessive overtime, with agents reporting nearly 1.2 million overtime hours in 2024.

Agents on smaller details worked more overtime than those on larger details: That year, agents on what was then Trump’s post-presidency detail reported an average of 454 overtime hours, compared with 336 overtime hours by agents on the vice president’s detail.

The figures almost certainly underrepresent the actual overtime hours from agents on protective details, as many agents don’t report all the time they work, according to current and former officials.

The service also routinely assigned agents to work consecutive shifts on little rest, according to the inspector general. Some reported working back-to-back days on less than four hours of sleep.

“The Secret Service cannot sustain effective protective operations when relying on overworked and fatigued personnel,” the report said.

As a backstop, the service relied on other law enforcement agencies to help secure events. At one event cited by the inspector general, more than three-quarters of post standers — those assigned to guard a specific area — were from Homeland Security Investigations.

“These staffing and work assignments are unsustainable and risk mission effectiveness,” the report said.

The report also indicated that staff shortages had led to some corner-cutting on protective work. It said the service had increasingly treated planned movements of its protectees as “off-the-record,” meaning they take place on much shorter timelines and without extensive security planning at the destination.

Off-the-record movements more than doubled from 2020 through 2024, according to the report. During one such movement, the inspector general said, agents disrupted an assassination attempt on Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, two months after the Butler attack. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, was sentenced to life in prison this year after being convicted of attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate.

The second of the inspector general’s reports focused specifically on the service’s missed opportunities to stop the Butler assassination attempt.

Investigators created a 3-D reconstruction of the grounds, rally stage and warehouse rooftop. The renderings showed how Crooks flew a drone undetected in the area hours before the rally and illustrated the drone’s vantage point from hundreds of yards away.

The report faulted the Secret Service for poor communications planning, saying agents missed more than 100 radio transmissions from local law enforcement who were posted in a separate communications room.

The service received just five phone calls and three texts about Crooks, who was seen mounting the roof with a range finder and long gun, according to the report. The inspector general also said the threat intelligence wasn’t properly shared within the service in the days before the event.

Both reports contained a note buried in the text: Publication was “significantly delayed,” they said, by three government shutdowns in Fiscal Year 2026.