In 2015, then-Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah led a wide-ranging congressional probe into the United States Secret Service brought to the forefront after waves of security failures. 

Now, more than a decade later, and in the aftermath of several attempts on President Donald Trump’s life, the former lawmaker says that his panel’s recommendations to reform the agency were not heeded — and have had disastrous consequences. 

Chaffetz, who represented Utah in the House of Representatives, chaired the powerful House Oversight Committee which analyzed more than 100 separate security incidents around the globe and found “an agency in crisis.” 

Latest attempt on Trump's life reanimates call for Secret Service review

That long record of security failures has again returned to the forefront after the latest attempted attack on senior Trump administration officials at the White House Correspondents' dinner last week. The defendant, Cole Allen, was charged with attempted assassination after he breached a security checkpoint and shot at Secret Service agents, hitting one of them in a non-fatal impact. 

“I'm sad to say, I think a lot of what Secret Service does, there are some heroic people, no doubt about it, and they do some things very well, but a lot of it is security theater, and a lot of it is they have a real issue, and they have got to fix things again,” Chaffetz told the John Solomon Reports podcast. 

“There's six key components that I recommended fixing, but 10 years gone by, and quite honestly, nothing has changed,” he added. 

Specifically, the oversight panel identified persistent staffing shortages, inadequate security clearance screening procedures, communication issues and called for reforms to the agency’s mission–splitting the Secret Service’s protective mandate from its responsibility to investigate financial crimes. 

Many of these issues remain to this day. In the wake of the Trump assassination attempts, the Homeland Security Inspector General warned that staffing shortages were plaguing U.S. Secret Service counter-sniper teams, entrusted with protecting the president and the most important government officials. 

Congressional panels investigating the assassination attempts also identified communication failures between agents that hampered response times, echoing similar failures during incidents like the 2011 White House shooting detailed in the Oversight Committee’s 2015 report.  

Chaffetz: “How do those people keep their jobs?”

Chaffetz recently described the “lack of accountability” as the “most disappointing” part of the agency’s failure to reform. “I thought when Donald Trump got shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, you know, a President of the United States is shot. He's down on the ground. He's bleeding. Thank goodness he survived and is doing fine. Now, every single one of the agents that were involved and engaged in that, every one of the people at the Secret Service, got a promotion,” Chaffetz told Just the News. 

“Nobody was fired. A president was shot,” he said. “How do those people keep their jobs?”

The Oversight Committee urged the president to consider appointing an outsider to lead the Secret Service in order to prevent an insider culture from impeding necessary reforms. This recommendation, and many of the others in the report, were never taken. 

Now, after several security failures in recent years — including now three attempts on Donald Trump’s life — House Republicans are moving forward with one of Chaffetz’s key recommendations: splitting the Secret Service to focus on its core mission, to protect the president.

The shocking assassination attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 exposed once again the protective agency’s shortcomings. The congressional panel reviewing the incident identified a combination of failures in “planning, execution, and leadership” leading up to and during the July 13 rally that exposed Trump to danger and “undermined the effectiveness of the human and material assets deployed that day.”

The panel also called out the Secret Service for failing to fully remedy the issues and for not terminating any agents or supervisors for the identified missteps.

New bipartisan legislation now proposed

On Thursday, Reps. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., and Russell Fry, R-S.C., introduced legislation to transfer the Secret Service from the Department of Homeland Security directly to the White House, cutting out bureaucratic paralysis. 

Moskowitz said the legislation was inspired by his work on the panel reviewing the Butler assassination attempt. "Going to Butler, talking to Secret Service, is when I realized, well, the Secret Service is suffering the same problems that FEMA is suffering," Moskowitz said in an interview with Fox News Digital. "Because they were such a small agency, they couldn't get the resources they needed. They couldn't get decisions being made."

"These pieces of legislation would streamline all three of those agencies," Moskowitz said. "It would cut a lot of the bureaucracy we're getting at DHS."

The pair’s legislation also includes provisions to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency a cabinet-level agency and transfer the Transportation Security Administration from DHS to the Transportation Department.