The numbers come first. A Government Accountability Office report released Thursday found that between 2015 and 2025, the U.S. Secret Service dealt with 83 security incidents but updated its protection policies in response to only 25 of them.
The agency also failed to update eight of 22 protection policies within the required four-year time frame, according to the report. A memorandum of understanding between the Secret Service and the Diplomatic Security Service, which sets out each agency's responsibilities for the president's overseas security, has not been updated since 1991, despite a requirement for annual review.
Among the unaddressed incidents cited in the report were a drone that made contact with President Barack Obama's motorcade in 2015 and another flown about 200 feet over a rally for then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The report found that the culprit in the July 2024 assassination attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, flew a drone for 11 minutes over the crowd, which helped him position himself to get a clear shot at Trump. The gunman positioned himself on a roof left unsecured, nicking the president's ear with a bullet.
'Some of the missing information has been relevant to subsequent attacks,' the report read, citing the Butler incident as an example of what can go wrong when the agency does not document its reasoning.
The report also referenced other episodes from Trump's tenure: a man with a rifle who got surprisingly close to Trump at his West Palm Beach golf course months after Butler, and, in April, an armed man who got beyond security barriers at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the president sat.
Nathan Tranquilli, acting director of the GAO, said the core concern is not any single incident but the agency's failure to document why it chose not to act. 'When you look at the Secret Service and you look at their mission, really it's a zero fail mission, and they've got a ton of challenges,' Tranquilli said. 'When decisions were being made about where to put time and energy, some of these things fell to the side, and, as a result, there were some delays.'
The GAO recommended three fixes, chief among them a requirement that the Secret Service document its rationale whenever a security incident does not trigger a policy update. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, agreed with all three recommendations and plans to implement changes, the report states. A Secret Service spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Power leaves a paper trail, and this one shows a federal agency that spent a decade collecting warning signs without writing down why it left them on the shelf. Taxpayers fund a protection mission billed as 'zero fail'; a report finding that two out of three flagged threats produced no documented policy response is not a technicality, it is an accountability gap with consequences that reached a rooftop in Butler.
The fix the GAO proposes is modest: write down the reasoning. That such a basic administrative discipline was missing at the agency guarding the president says something about how the sprawling federal bureaucracy manages risk even in its highest-stakes mission. DHS says it will comply. Congress, and the public paying for this protection, should hold it to that.
