After Three Assassination Attempts, Congress Wants the Secret Service Out of DHS. Would That Actually Help?

Three assassination attempts against a sitting president in under two years have pushed a long-simmering structural question to the front of the legislative queue: Does the Secret Service belong inside the Department of Homeland Security?

On May 7, 2026, Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Russell Fry (R-S.C.) formally introduced legislation to transfer the U.S. Secret Service out of DHS and make it a direct report to the White House [1]. The bill is part of a broader package that would also spin FEMA into an independent cabinet-level agency and move TSA under the Department of Transportation [1]. Moskowitz is partnering with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) on the FEMA measure and co-leading the TSA transfer with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) [1].

"Because they were such a small agency, they couldn't get the resources they needed. They couldn't get decisions being made," Moskowitz said of the Secret Service under DHS [1]. Fry framed it as a matter of mission clarity: "The Secret Service should be able to focus solely on its mission of protecting top U.S. officials — not dealing with bureaucratic tape" [1].

The bill reportedly has 12 cosponsors as of its introduction [2]. But cosponsors and law are different things. The history of post-crisis Secret Service reform is a history of proposals that stall, water down, or die in committee.

The Attacks That Forced the Question

The legislative push follows an unprecedented sequence of security incidents targeting President Trump.

On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, striking Trump in the ear and killing one attendee. The shooter had positioned himself on a rooftop within 150 yards of the stage — a location that multiple law enforcement officers had flagged as a security concern before the event [3][4].

On September 15, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh was spotted by a Secret Service agent aiming a rifle through bushes at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The agent fired; Routh dropped his weapon and fled without shooting. He was later convicted on all five federal counts and sentenced to life in prison [5].

On April 25, 2026, Cole Thomas Allen stormed past the security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents' Dinner — the first such event Trump attended during either term — and fired a Mossberg pump-action shotgun toward the ballroom stairs. Buckshot struck a Secret Service agent's body armor. Allen was charged with attempting to assassinate the president [6][7].

Each incident produced its own investigation, and each investigation pointed to overlapping failures.

What the Investigations Found

Multiple congressional investigations and an independent review panel have produced a detailed record of what went wrong — particularly at Butler.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), released its final report in July 2025 after 17 transcribed interviews and a review of more than 75,000 pages of documents. The report found that "lack of structured communication was likely the greatest contributor to the failures" at Butler [3]. Secret Service agents had chronic radio problems; in one case, a countersniper was offered a local radio but could not pick it up because he was busy trying to fix his own malfunctioning Secret Service radio [3].

The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), found that senior Secret Service officials had received classified intelligence about a threat to Trump's life ten days before the Butler rally but failed to relay it to federal and local law enforcement personnel responsible for securing the site [4].

The bipartisan House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump conducted 46 transcribed interviews, reviewed approximately 20,000 documents, and held two public hearings before issuing 37 recommendations. The Task Force found that inexperienced personnel had been assigned major advance-planning responsibilities for a high-risk outdoor event, and that agents in key positions "did not clearly understand the delineation of their responsibilities" [8].

The Secret Service also "denied or left unfulfilled at least 10 requests" from Trump's detail for additional resources, including counter-drone systems, counter-assault team personnel, and counter-snipers [3].

Critically, the Secret Service did not fire a single person involved in the Butler rally. It formally disciplined only six personnel — some as late as July 2025 — and in two instances reduced the recommended punishment [3][9].

DHS Structure vs. Internal Failures

The investigations present a more complicated picture than the "remove from DHS" framing suggests. Most of the specific failures identified — radio malfunctions, denied resource requests, inexperienced personnel assignments, intelligence not passed along within the agency — were attributed to Secret Service leadership, training, and resource allocation, not to the DHS chain of command as such [3][4][8].

The absence of a clear chain of command at Butler was described as an internal Secret Service problem: no single individual was designated as responsible for approving all site security plans [3]. The Paul report recommended that the Secret Service "designate a single individual responsible for approving all plans" — a recommendation directed at the agency itself, not at DHS oversight [3].

That said, the resource-denial problem does connect to the DHS structure. Under DHS, the Secret Service competes for funding and personnel allocations with 21 other component agencies, including much larger organizations like Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Several former officials and lawmakers have argued that this competition dilutes Secret Service priorities [10][11].

A Recurring Debate: Two Decades of Failed Transfers

The current proposal is not the first attempt to extract the Secret Service from DHS. The agency operated under the Treasury Department from its founding in 1865 until March 1, 2003, when it was transferred to the newly created Department of Homeland Security as part of the post-9/11 reorganization [10].

In 2020, President Trump's own budget request included funding to move the Secret Service back to Treasury. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf both supported the move. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced the U.S. Secret Service Mission Improvement and Realignment Act, with a companion House bill from Reps. Roger Williams (R-Texas) and Denny Heck (D-Wash.) [10][11].

That effort was blocked by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), then the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who called it "a bad idea that will not make us any safer" and warned it "could hurt DHS operations" [10][11]. Former DHS Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Jeh Johnson — one a Republican appointee, the other a Democrat — jointly argued the effort appeared politically motivated and emphasized that the Secret Service's cybercrime work aligned well with DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [11].

In 2022, Reps. Roger Williams (R-Texas) and David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) introduced another transfer bill. It did not advance [11].

The current Moskowitz-Fry proposal differs from its predecessors in one significant respect: rather than returning the agency to Treasury, it would make the Secret Service a direct report to the White House — a structure with no modern precedent for a law enforcement agency of this size [1].

Budget and Staffing: Growth Under DHS

Critics of the DHS structure often point to resource constraints, but the budget record tells a more complex story. The Secret Service's appropriation has grown from approximately $1.24 billion in FY2003 — the year of the DHS transfer — to $3.37 billion in FY2025, with a $3.63 billion request for FY2027 [12][13].

Source: DHS Budget Documents / CRS Reports

Data as of Mar 1, 2026CSV

Staffing has followed a similar trajectory. The agency had roughly 6,571 positions in 2003. That number dipped slightly in the early 2010s before climbing to 8,882 positions by 2025 [12].

Source: DHS/CRS Budget Documents

Data as of Mar 1, 2026CSV

These numbers require context. The number of protectees has also expanded significantly — the Secret Service now provides protection to a larger roster of current and former officials and their families, and the threat environment has grown more complex. A Congressional Research Service fact sheet notes that due to restructuring of appropriations accounts in FY2017, a comparable breakdown of protection-specific activities before that date is not possible, making precise historical comparisons difficult [12].

No publicly available GAO or Inspector General report has quantified a measurable decline in protective capacity that can be directly attributed to the DHS merger, as opposed to other factors like expanded protectee lists, evolving threat profiles, or internal management decisions [14].

The Case Against Separation: Intelligence and Coordination

The strongest argument for keeping the Secret Service inside DHS centers on intelligence infrastructure.

DHS operates 80 fusion centers nationwide — state and local hubs where federal, state, tribal, and territorial agencies share threat-related information [15]. The department's Intelligence and Analysis office (I&A) serves as the executive agent for coordinating DHS activities with these centers and acts as a bridge between the intelligence community and non-federal partners [15].

The Secret Service currently benefits from this network for advance threat assessments and protective intelligence. An independent Secret Service would need to negotiate formal information-sharing agreements to maintain access — agreements that would depend on interagency cooperation rather than intra-departmental authority [15].

Former DHS Secretaries Chertoff and Johnson have argued that severing the Secret Service from DHS would weaken coordination with CBP, ICE, and CISA on matters directly relevant to protective operations — border-crossing threat data, cybersecurity intelligence, and event security for National Special Security Events like inaugurations and summits [11].

No formal cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office or any major think tank has been published for the current proposal. The administrative overhead of standing up a new independent agency — duplicating HR, legal counsel, procurement, IT infrastructure, and other shared services currently provided by DHS — remains unquantified in public documents. The 2020 Treasury transfer proposal, which would have moved the agency into an existing department rather than creating a standalone entity, also lacked a public CBO score [10][11].

How Other Countries Handle It

Comparing the U.S. structure with peer nations offers limited but instructive parallels.

In the United Kingdom, the Protection Command — which includes Royalty and Specialist Protection (RaSP) — operates as a unit within the Metropolitan Police Service's Specialist Operations directorate, not under the Home Office's security apparatus [16]. In Israel, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) handles VIP protection through its Unit 730 and reports directly to the Prime Minister, independent of the Ministry of Defense [17].

These structures differ significantly from each other and from the U.S. model. The UK embeds protection within policing; Israel embeds it within a domestic intelligence agency that also handles counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Neither model maps cleanly onto the "independent agency reporting to the White House" structure proposed by Moskowitz and Fry.

No peer-reviewed comparative study has established a correlation between structural independence of a protective service and measurable improvements in protective effectiveness. The available evidence suggests that operational culture, training standards, resource allocation, and intelligence quality matter more than where an agency sits on an organizational chart [14][16][17].

The Legislative Path Forward

For the Moskowitz-Fry bill to become law, it would need to pass through committees with jurisdiction over DHS reorganization — primarily the House and Senate Homeland Security committees, with potential involvement from Judiciary and Appropriations. As of the bill's introduction, the full list of cosponsors and their committee assignments has not been publicly detailed beyond the lead sponsors [1][2].

The legislative environment is complicated. Congress just emerged from a record 76-day DHS funding lapse that ended on April 30, 2026, when Trump signed a funding bill covering most of the department [18]. During the shutdown, more than 1,000 TSA agents resigned, and broader DHS operations were strained [1][18]. Appetite for another fight over DHS's structure may be limited — or, alternatively, the dysfunction may have created an opening for more fundamental reforms.

Moskowitz has said he discussed the reform package with Trump administration officials and believes there is "extensive bipartisan support" for overhauling DHS [1]. But similar post-incident reform efforts have a poor track record. After a series of embarrassing security failures in 2014 — including a fence-jumper who made it deep into the White House — Congress held hearings, an independent panel issued 19 recommendations, and the Secret Service director resigned. The structural relationship between the Secret Service and DHS was not altered [14].

Who Is Driving the Debate

The "remove from DHS" position draws support from a range of actors. Current and former Secret Service agents have spoken publicly and to congressional investigators about resource constraints and bureaucratic friction under DHS [3][9]. Several former agents have built careers as security consultants and media commentators; their expertise is genuine, but readers should note that some have financial interests in the private security sector that could benefit from heightened public concern about government protective failures [19].

On the other side, institutional defenders of DHS — including former secretaries from both parties and current department leadership — have consistently argued that organizational unity serves national security interests [10][11]. Their positions, too, carry institutional weight: former secretaries often maintain consulting relationships with defense and homeland security contractors.

The bipartisan composition of the current bill's sponsors — a Florida Democrat and a South Carolina Republican — reflects genuine cross-party concern about presidential security. Whether that concern translates into the sustained legislative energy required to reorganize a cabinet department remains an open question. Every previous attempt has failed.

What Comes Next

The Moskowitz-Fry bill faces the same structural obstacles that defeated its predecessors: committee jurisdiction fights, resistance from DHS defenders, the absence of a cost estimate, and the inevitable cooling of urgency as time passes after a crisis. The bill's novel feature — White House reporting rather than a Treasury transfer — may attract support from an administration that has shown interest in consolidating executive authority, but it also raises questions about politicizing a law enforcement agency by placing it directly under presidential control.

The investigations into Butler, West Palm Beach, and the Correspondents' Dinner attack have established a clear record of operational failures. The harder question — whether those failures are products of the DHS structure or of management, training, and resource decisions that would follow the agency regardless of where it sits — remains contested. Reorganizing an agency's reporting lines is a concrete, visible action. Whether it addresses the actual problems is a separate matter entirely.