I am perfectly OK with increasing reliance on the Secret Service over local LE, but we need to acknowledge that this approach - emphasizing the Secret Service over local partners, would inevitably entail a further expansion of the Secret Service mission, which has already outstripped past funding increases.
We need to acknowledge also, that staffing challenges have been and will continue to be part of the problem: the selection process is necessarily cumbersome, and the job duties are often tedious for the kind of high-functioning, dedicated people the Service seeks to employ. This is a natural limitation on our ability to expand SS coverage as you and others suggest.
It is also very important to have a the agency as uninfluenced by politians as possible.
Some people seem to believe that there was a deliberate "slow walk" or lackluster detail for Trump. I see absolutely no evidence of this. But, it is important to make sure nothing like this could happen; no administration should have the capability to weaponize secret service.
Once again, there is NO reason to believe there was any deliberate or personal mistakes on the part of the secret service, but I want to point something out.
Allowing twitter politicians to imply there was something personal and political to get away with demanding that politics make secret service decisions, call for resignations, etc, because politicians want them makes the secret service MORE vulnerable to that kind of abuse. Ironically, there seems to me to be a group of people who want a security agency run by a constantly changing and heated congress. The irony is allowing politicians to make demands of the agency will create a corrupt secret service.
Secret service work should be boring, dry and precise. It's not conducive to run such an agency by popular whim. The more it is run by popular whim, the more realistic the dystopian fear that one administration will use the agency against a rival.
Civil servants are hired by a system designed to keep politicians out of it. The unions, pensions, etc. are not just there because it creates a safe working environment for the employees. It creates a bureaucracy that is fortified against the whims of the next elected official. Protecting the employees Of some organizations protects us all.
I do understand that there are problems with agencies, and, for instance, the day of the murder and attempted assassination was absolutely a day to look closely at the Secret Service. But politicizing an agency is the exact opposite of a solution. It is the kind of action that could make what some people fear- that Secret Service deliberately fumbled- actually come true.
MOO
nypost.com
