Working criminal cases (put on hold) AND traveling ALL over the place to work protection detail’s is NOT easy , and it’s beginnning to seem like NOT worth it for a growing number of people……..
They people decdiaded to their job ARE Human….
The work Hard
But?
They cannot work miracles…..
And throwing money at the Service isn’t gonna just make ingraineed other issue’s go away….
The agency knew it would face an avalanche in 2024. There would be presidential campaigns. Political conventions. A NATO summit. It was looking to be one of the busiest years in the Secret Service’s recent history, even as threats of violence against political leaders were rising.
The service was not ready.
“Now more than ever, it is critical that we retain employees,” Kimberly A. Cheatle, the Secret Service director at the time, wrote in an agencywide email in July 2023.
But instead of growing, as the big year approached, the service shrank. At least 1,400 of its 7,800 employees left in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, the largest outflow from the agency in at least two decades, federal data show.
This summer, two assassination attempts against former President Donald J. Trump revealed deep problems in the Secret Service. Failures in technology meant a would-be assassin was able to use a drone for surveillance. Failures in command meant a nearby rooftop was left unprotected for him to climb. Failures in communication meant he was able to fire, even after being spotted.
But agents say one problem underlies all the others: an exodus of the best-trained people.
Their departures, partly rooted in longstanding failures by the Secret Service management, have left agents in a kind of permanent state of emergency, lacking the focus, rest and training necessary to do their jobs well, more than two dozen current and former employees told The New York Times.
Among the reasons they leave:
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Crushing amounts of overtime work, often assigned at the last minute and sometimes without pay.
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An initiative to rehire retired Secret Service agents, which backfired by spurring more employees to retire so they could be paid a salary and a pension at once.
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Perceptions of favoritism in promotions and hiring, including an episode in which the agency’s chief uniformed officer moonlighted as a real-estate agent for subordinates, who then won promotions.
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Pleas from agents to rapidly embrace new technology like drones that could improve protection efforts and ease the workload went unheeded.
The loss of so many valuable agents might be less of a crisis if enough people — and the right people — were ready and waiting to take their place. But management had not solved that problem either.
Recruiting standards slumped, longtime agents said, as the agency ushered more people in the door. Training, which takes years to adequately prepare a new hire to protect a president under the best of circumstances, was slowed by a decrepit facility where the fight-training room flooded during downpours.
The Secret Service and top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees it, acknowledged some of the problems and said in interviews that they were taking them seriously……
image…Diane Rehm
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