Panel Calls for Secret Service Overhaul in Report on Trump Shooting Attempt

An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.

The recommendations, part of a report released Thursday commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, outlined deficiencies that have already been identified in the months after the rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. Those include the failure of the Secret Service to secure a nearby building where a rooftop would-be assassin fired eight shots toward Mr. Trump. That and other security lapses, members of the panel said, result from an absence of “critical thinking” among agents and supervisors.

The panel was particularly struck by a “lack of ownership” conveyed by the agents it interviewed. Those involved in the security planning did not take responsibility in the lead-up to the event, nor did they own failures in the aftermath. And, the report added, they “have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions or opportunities for improvement.”

The findings are stark but familiar. A panel convened in 2014 after a man scaled the White House fence and entered the mansion made similar proposals. That the issues persist a decade later underscores the challenge of overhauling an agency with such an entrenched culture.

“The service has become insular and stale,” Janet Napolitano, a member of the four-person panel, said in an interview. Ms. Napolitano was the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency, from 2009 to 2013. “It is time for the service to kind of break out and to reach out beyond its own agency to bring in talent that can really take a fresh look at what it is they do, and how they do it.” In the past century, the agency has had only one director not promoted from within.

The panel included Frances Fragos Townsend, a former homeland security adviser during the George W. Bush administration; David Mitchell, who has been in law enforcement for more than 50 years; and Mark Filip, a former deputy attorney general during the Bush administration. They conducted 58 interviews and reviewed more than 7,000 documents.

“The Secret Service must be the world’s leading governmental protective organization,” the report said. “The events at Butler on July 13 demonstrate that, currently, it is not.”

Should the service adopt the panel’s recommendation that it shift its focus almost entirely to protection operations, that would mean shedding much of its historic role in investigating financial crimes.

A Secret Service spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The agency has already made significant changes since July 13, including assigning additional personnel and assets to Mr. Trump’s detail and taking steps to ensure the security planning process for events is more thorough. Mr. Trump was targeted again on Sept. 15 when a man with a rifle hid near where Mr. Trump was playing golf in Florida.

The independent review is one of several investigations begun after the July 13 assassination attempt. Lawmakers are conducting their own inquiries, and the Secret Service did an internal review. Among the key failures identified: the absence of a single Secret Service agent in charge of the security for the Butler rally, the complacency of some of the agents involved in securing the rally and the lack of clear instructions from the Secret Service to local officials who were helping them.

But the independent review panel’s blunt assessment is the first to identify failures on the part of senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail.

The panel listed instances in which the site agent who was charged with organizing the security at the Butler Farm Show grounds did not do a thorough job of ensuring key security was in place ahead of the rally, in part because she was inexperienced. She graduated from the agency’s academy in 2020 and joined Mr. Trump’s detail in 2023.

The decision to give her this assignment, the panel said, appeared to be based on her availability “and without adequate consideration by supervisory personnel within the detail regarding the agent’s level of experience and associated aptitude and training, or lack thereof, for contributing to the planning of a major outdoor rally event like Butler.”

The panel also noted the lack of experience of another agent on Mr. Trump’s detail who was assigned to operate a drone detection system on the day of the rally. The agent, who joined the service four years ago, had received only informal training about how to use the system, and July 13 was just the third time he operated it at an event. The day of the rally, he faced significant technical challenges that he spent hours trying to resolve. As a result, the equipment was not operational when the gunman, Thomas Crooks, flew a drone over the rally site that afternoon.

“Both examples demonstrate the potential role that inexperience by Trump detail personnel may have played in certain aspects of the planning for and execution of the July 13 rally,” the panel wrote.

The site agent from Mr. Trump’s detail is one of six agents to be placed on restricted duty since the July assassination attempt. The other five are from the service’s Pittsburgh field office. The agency’s director at the time, Kimberly A. Cheatle, has resigned.

This disparity in casting blame has caused considerable divisions in the agency, amid questions about why certain members of Mr. Trump’s detail have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as agents in the Pittsburgh office.

The panel’s recommendations range from specific changes, such as having aerial surveillance at every outdoor event, to institutional shifts, such as prioritizing continual training and establishing a training program for leadership.

The panel members also singled out a failure at Butler that has been somewhat overlooked in other reviews to date: the troubling way the agents surrounding Mr. Trump allowed the upper half of his body to be exposed at a time when no one knew whether other shooters remained. The panel recommended agents undergo further training on properly removing someone they are protecting from danger.

While much of the focus since the failed assassination has been on the agency’s stretched resources during an intense campaign season, the panel cautioned against expecting more funding to solve its problems.

“If the remediation and reform dialogue around the failures of July 13 devolves into a discussion about how much additional money the service should receive, critical lessons from July 13 will have been lost,” the report said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.