Tangle - A closer look at the Secret Service.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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The effects of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump are sure to reverberate across our country for months — and potentially years — to come.

In the immediate term, it is likely to impact the way both leading candidates campaign. Pollsters believe it will have a serious impact on the 2024 outcome — solidifying support for Trump among people who already lean his way. Already, in the immediate aftermath, a handful of incredibly wealthy technocrats — including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — have come out to support Trump. People around the former president say he is still coming to terms with how close he came to death. 

The incident could also have a major impact on the Secret Service — the agency tasked with protecting current and past presidents, their families, and other high-profile politicians. 

Some pundits (and even some straight-news reporters) have begun describing the near assassination of Trump as the greatest Secret Service failure in decades. After that failure, we were inundated with questions from readers: Who was responsible for the shooter getting a clean attempt at the former president? How does the Secret Service actually protect politicians? What politicians do they protect? What did they do wrong last weekend? What did they do right? Are the standards for male and female agents different? What’s the agency’s budget? What does this agency even do, fundamentally?

Today, we’ve decided to take a deep dive into the agency to answer all those questions. For this piece, we interviewed a former Secret Service agent, researched the history and infrastructure of the agency, and then broke down everything we know about the recent assassination attempt.

History

The United States Secret Service (USSS) has a somewhat counter-intuitive history — traces of which are still evident in its mission today — dating back to the 1860s. At the time, the U.S. financial system consisted of over 1,600 banks each issuing their own bank notes. To resolve the lack of centralization, and to finance the war against the Confederates, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 1862 to allow the Treasury Department to print paper money not backed by gold or silver. Because of the legislation’s hasty enaction, precautions against forgeries were scant and many bills were counterfeited. By 1865, roughly one third of all paper money in circulation was fake. Abraham Lincoln proposed a commission to look into ways to combat this issue, which resulted in legislation to fund the USSS as an anti-counterfeiting arm of the Treasury Department.

Curiously, the Secret Service — the agency which would eventually have the responsibility to protect presidents — was founded in July 1865, two months after the assassination of the president who authorized the service’s commission. Throughout its early history, the USSS was responsible for anti-counterfeiting measures and protecting against attempted frauds on the U.S. government. It began part-time informal protection of President Grover Cleveland in 1894 and formally began its presidential protective mission following the 1901 assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo, New York. 

Title 18 Section 3056 of the United States Code authorizes the Secret Service to protect not just presidents, but the entire first family, the vice president and their family, former presidents and their families, visiting heads of state, and “major” political candidates and their spouses within 120 days of a general presidential election. As defined in the statute, "major presidential and vice presidential candidates" are identified by the Secretary of Homeland Security after consultation with an advisory committee.

Over time, the agency’s purview has not only retained its initial anti-counterfeiting and its more well known presidential security charges, but has expanded. In 1998, President Bill Clinton gave the Secret Service the responsibility to provide security at high-profile events like the presidential inauguration and the Super Bowl. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush transferred the administration of the Secret Service to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, which still administers the service today, resulting in its list of responsibilities expanding further.

In addition to its security mandate, the Secret Service is charged with investigating financial and cyber crimes, which include not only counterfeiting of U.S. currency but also forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury notes, credit card fraud, and other electronic fraud or theft. In 1995, the service established an electronic crimes task force (ECTF) in New York, which was expanded upon by the Patriot Act in 2001 to become a nationwide ECTF. The Secret Service also collaborates with other law enforcement agencies as a member of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and a partner of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Since 1901, the only president to have been assassinated under the Secret Service’s protection is John F.  Kennedy, who was killed in Dallas in 1963. However, three other presidents or former presidents have been shot while under Secret Service protection: Former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot and minorly injured before a speech in 1912, President Ronald Reagan was shot and severely injured in 1981, and former President Donald Trump was recently shot in the ear while giving a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

Roosevelt is the only other political candidate aside from Trump to be shot while running for president; and, like Trump, he had lost a re-election campaign as the incumbent and then re-joined the fray to run for re-election. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt was shot in the chest (by former saloonkeeper John Schrank, who was detained without being killed at the former president’s behest), and his life was saved by a folded copy of a speech he was carrying in his breast pocket. The bullet was slowed enough by the speech not to penetrate his heart, but it would remain lodged in his chest for the rest of his life. Roosevelt would go on to lose his re-election campaign (a detail we can’t yet file as a similarity or a difference to Trump).

In the history of the Secret Service, only one agent has been killed while protecting the president — Officer Leslie William Coffelt was killed in 1950 while protecting President Harry S. Truman from members of a Puerto Rican nationalist party. Additionally, six Secret Service agents and administrators were killed in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, an act of domestic terrorism that claimed the lives of 168 people.

When it was first transferred to the oversight of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the Secret Service had an operational budget of $1.2 billion. In 2024, the agency’s funding reached $3.1 billion.