John Oliver on the Secret Service, overworked and underfunded: ‘actively reckless’ | Jean Olivier

OhIn the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked at the secret services, responsible among other things for protecting the American president. “Agents have a high-stakes job, and that’s what makes it so concerning that, by all accounts, the Secret Service is heading into what could be one of its most difficult times yet,” the host noted, referring to 2028, or what some agents have called “Armageddon,” as the service will be tasked with staffing the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics, the United Nations annual general meeting, and both presidential candidates and their families during the election.

So it’s no wonder that the Secret Service recruited none other than action movie impresario Michael Bay to direct a Super Bowl recruitment ad claiming that “protectors are born, not made” and included a photo of the July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump was shot in the ear. “It’s not exactly a moment of triumph for them, is it?” » noted Olivier. “It’s a little strange to choose to self-promote using a low self-image.”

Given all of this, Oliver delved into the many problems facing the beleaguered agency, starting with its “inauspicious” origin story: The agency was created by Abraham Lincoln, who signed a law authorizing it just hours before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending a show at Ford’s Theater. In fact, Secret Service agents were initially tasked with combating counterfeit paper money. It was not until the early 20th century, after the assassinations of James A. Garfield and William McKinley, that they became the president’s bodyguards.

Modern Secret Service agents now provide presidential protection, although technically counterfeiting investigations are still an important part of the Secret Service’s mandate, and agents in 115 field offices across the country are also responsible for catching credit card skimmers, romance scammers and other low-level financial crimes. “Which is pretty amazing,” Oliver said. “It’s like having a bad car accident and being saved by Ryan Seacrest – wait, that’s one of your jobs too? You take on a lot.

“Some officers will insist that these investigations are what keeps their sanity and can also help them build relationships with local law enforcement,” he added. “But that’s still a lot to put on their plate, especially when that plate is already pretty full.”

Officers’ duty to protect extends not only to the President but also to his family, the Vice President, former Presidents and their spouses, visiting foreign heads of state or government, distinguished foreign visitors, leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates and much more. The work can be very difficult, requiring hours of work in advance and extremely long shifts, in addition to the psychological burden of being willing to take a bullet for someone, with wages subject to a federal cap and overtime often worked for free.

“As high as the stakes of their work are, they have always been stretched in terms of manpower and resources,” Oliver said, demonstrating an unofficial agency slogan of “we do more with less.” Rather than building a full-scale replica of the White House for training, for example, agents were sent to train on an 80 percent version in Atlanta, built like a television set by Tyler Perry.

“So the agency is often extremely stretched, and this has happened even as its tasks have increased,” Oliver said. During the last presidential election, Secret Service agents were tasked with protecting 43 people 24 hours a day, and the Trump family took over. twelve times more family trips than the Obama family. “And if there’s a member of the Trump family watching this right now who learns for the first time that the rest of your family took over 1,600 trips without you, then I’m so sorry you had to find out that way, whoever you are, Eric,” Oliver joked.

“The fact is that the agency is clearly under considerable pressure, but even that doesn’t fully explain the amount of inexplicable stupidity that has happened at an accelerating rate since the start of the Obama presidency,” Oliver continued. “That’s when it’s true that their job became much more difficult,” as the agency saw a 400 percent increase in the number of threats against the president. “And if you don’t know why violent threats were made from one guy to another,” he added alongside photos of George W. Bush and then Obama, “I have some interesting news for you: you are a liar.

“And with threats growing, you’d think the agency would have been on high alert. That’s what makes it so strange that they had a number of long-forgotten security breaches and scandals, like a man who in 2014 scaled the White House fence with a knife and entered the building because the front doors were unlocked. Or, perhaps more humiliating, a scandal involving a sex worker in Colombia in 2011 that compromised information about the president’s whereabouts, revealing systemic cultural problems within the agency.

“All of this – an exhausted, overstretched workforce, limited resources and really poor judgment – ​​all of this came to a head in Butler, Pennsylvania,” Oliver said. In addition to the many, many mistakes made that day — including failing to secure the nearby building where the shooter climbed onto the roof, and failing to protect the area from drones due to a technical glitch and lack of Ethernet cables — a report found that officers accrued 1.2 million overtime hours that year with back-to-back shifts and little recovery rest, contributing to burnout and attrition.

An independent review of the department concluded that the agency “needs fundamental reform to carry out its mission…without this reform, another butler can and will happen again.”

Oliver therefore called for a bigger budget, spent more wisely, but noted that, as noted in the report, even an unlimited budget would not prevent another butler.

“And that’s because when a problem is this persistent and cultural, it requires a much deeper level of intervention,” he concluded. “Look, this job ideally requires incredibly brave and incredibly competent people. It’s a job that I personally couldn’t and shouldn’t do. But the very fact that it’s such an important job means that the agency having an insular culture built around doing more with less is not only exhausting for the agents involved. It can be actively reckless.”