Is the Secret Service too broken to protect Trump?

The Secret Service was created to hunt counterfeit money, and only started guarding presidents after three assassinations forced Congress's hand in 1901. More than a century later, agents still split their careers between protecting the President and investigating fake twenties. The agency is understaffed by over 20 percent, and burnt-out staff are hitting mandated overtime pay caps by the thousands. It's already led to scandal, security lapses, and a botched response to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the threats are multiplying and becoming even more complex; domestic militia plots and foreign intelligence operatives are becoming more common. So can an agency stretched this thin actually keep up? Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  One of Australia's most recognisable broadcasters is facing the biggest battle of his life. Alan Jones has pleaded not guilty to multiple historical sexual assault charges and now the case is before the courts.

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  I'm not going to dwell here on the allegations made about me, other than to say that I refute them entirely.

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• 0:38Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people. In June this year, a 911 operator took a pretty extraordinary phone call.

• 0:48Speaker 04

  Dispatch.

• 0:49Speaker 05

  Hi there, I was calling to speak to a deputy.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  Okay, what's it in reference to?

• 0:57Matt Bevan?

  The person taking the call is in the sheriff's office in the rural community of Danville, Ohio.

• 1:03Speaker 05

  I'm in Danville, so I wasn't sure if there was somebody in Danville that was on duty that I could just talk to, I could even go down to the police station.

• 1:10Matt Bevan?

  The woman said that she had some concerns about her son after she found a large cache of guns and ammunition in his bedroom.

• 1:18Speaker 05

  He's wanting to leave this weekend and go with a group of people to help like, fight the corrupt government.

• 1:28Matt Bevan?

  The police arrived at the house to meet her 19-year-old son Tyson Propper.

• 1:33Speaker 06

  Hey, what's up Tyson? What's up? I'm Officer Powell with Danville Police. Just wanted to see what was going on. Not much. Yeah, said you've been talking to some people online and stuff, upset with the government.

• 1:45Matt Bevan?

  Turns out Tyson had been communicating with a large group of men online and they were all planning on meeting up.

• 1:52Speaker 06

  Where did you guys plan on meeting up? West Virginia. West Virginia? All the mountains and stuff.

• 1:57Matt Bevan?

  The guys had all given themselves code names: Shepherd, Fulcrum, Whiskey Six. Tyson was Prox. It was all very cloak and dagger, except for the fact that one dude's codename was shriveled schlong.

• 2:10Speaker 06

  So you want to go to another state and meet up with people that you don't even know their real name? Seems like a, a pretty bad idea.

• 2:19Matt Bevan?

  This was a few days before the big UFC event at the White House.

• 2:23Speaker 07

  Welcome to UFC Freedom 250. Here is the President of the United States of America, Double J Trump.

• 2:32Matt Bevan?

  Tyson and his gang were allegedly planning to attack the event with explosive drones. When the explosions went off and people started to evacuate, the gang were going to shoot at them with sniper rifles. They had amassed weapons, tactical gear and other supplies.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Bought an AR. Bought a shotgun.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Oh, I took pictures of that.

• 2:53Speaker 06

  Thousands of rounds of ammo, mags, camping gear, trauma kit, tourniquets, bandages, canned food.

• 3:02Matt Bevan?

  The sheriff decided that all this was a bit concerning.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  It's a little bit alarming about all the things that you've been purchasing with your graduation money and then talking with this group of people online. I'm concerned that you might have gotten caught up with something not so great.

• 3:23Matt Bevan?

  Yeah, okay, so the sheriffs in Ohio seem pretty understated.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  If you don't mind, if you want to grab some shoes or something like that, if you want to grab your wallet, phone, we're going to take you to KCH and have you talk with a behavioural specialist. Maybe they can straighten things out, help you see things a little differently.

• 3:45Matt Bevan?

  Tyson Propper and seven others have now been indicted on charges of conspiracy to murder federal government officials and other targets, including President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu. Fortunately, the plan was foiled before anything could happen. The problem is not everyone's mum is going to find out about it and call the cops. There was a time when lone gunmen were the main threat to the president's safety, but now this kind of thing is happening too with increasing frequency.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Make no mistake, this was an attempted assassination of the President of the United States.

• 4:27Matt Bevan?

  To make matters worse, this is all happening at a time when the US Secret Service is in the midst of a crisis, one they have been facing for more than a decade.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  The Secret Service was experiencing a staffing crisis that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency.

• 4:51Matt Bevan?

  I've been taking a look at the state of the US Secret Service myself and it's really bad. The agency is critically understaffed, underpaid and seems to be regularly on the brink of catastrophe. You've reduced their training down to such low levels that, that you combine that with fatigue and you're, you're looking for a disaster. So today, the story of how an agency in turmoil is facing an almost impossible challenge, keeping the president safe by predicting the unpredictable. I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

• 5:29Matt Bevan?

  Whenever the US president travels abroad, a team of Secret Service special agents travel to the location two weeks beforehand to basically case the joint.

• 5:42Speaker 06

  The advance teams would go out, you know, roughly 15 and sometimes even 20 days, depending on the nature of the visit and the type of summit.

• 5:50Matt Bevan?

  Their job is to make sure everything will be okay when the president arrives.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  It's the cars, it's food, it's medical supplies, it's the whole White House is actually moving regardless of the length of time that the president is travelling.

• 6:04Matt Bevan?

  Now, as you can imagine, this process involves the team doing recon around locations, checking rooms for listening devices, advance meetings to ensure that everything feels safe and secure. But completing all those tasks apparently doesn't take the full two weeks. And so the Secret Service team apparently has a bit of free time on their hands, which is why until relatively recently, the Secret Service seems to have seen these advanced trips as basically government-funded holidays where all the agents would party from the time they arrived to the time the president arrived. And there was one particular trip in 2012 to Cartagena in Colombia, ahead of President

• 6:47Matt Bevan?

  Barack Obama's visit to a summit, where this partying got out of hand. Now, the agents were clearly very excited for this trip, as evidenced by the very serious and official email correspondence that they were sending to each other in the lead up. One of the emails read, swag cologne, check, pimp gear, check, swag sunglasses, check, cash for them hoes, check. Now, I'm pretty confident that there wasn't an official budget line in the Secret Service accounts allocated to financing, quote, them hoes. But back in 2012, these advanced visits often involved paying for sex workers.

• 7:30Speaker 06

  Agents and members of the military preparing for the Summit of the Americas brought at least 20 foreign women into this summit hotel.

• 7:38Matt Bevan?

  The morning before President Obama's arrival, one of the Secret Service agents refused to pay a sex worker who he had convinced to spend the night with him a bill of $800. He reportedly thought that prostitution was illegal in Colombia, so she would be unable to report this to the police. He was wrong and the police arrived to investigate. It wasn't long until the media found out too.

• 8:03Speaker 06

  The scandal erupted over the weekend in Colombia and involves at least 11 agents, about 10 military service members and as many as 20 women.

• 8:14Matt Bevan?

  Understandably, the whole incident was incredibly embarrassing for the Secret Service.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  I do have a lot of jokes about the Secret Service. You know, I told them for $800 I wouldn't tell them, but they only offered 30, so. The fact that the Secret Service behaves so...

• 8:30Matt Bevan?

  badly in Colombia shows one thing, they do not respect the president or the office of the president. But worse than that, it exposed a very, very serious problem at the very heart of the Secret Service, one that puts their whole mission at risk. But before we get to that, I think it's important to understand exactly what the Secret Service actually is.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  These are the Secret Service agents who are prepared to give their own lives to protect the commander in chief.

• 9:05Matt Bevan?

  The story of the Secret Service starts on the 14th of April 1865, the day President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Lincoln had signed the legislation creating the Secret Service just a few hours before his death, which feels very ironic, but the Secret Service he was creating wasn't designed to protect the president.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  I had always thought the Secret Service protected the president since the service was established back in 1865, but this duty actually began with Theodore Roosevelt after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901.

• 9:40Matt Bevan?

  This is from a US government film called The Secret Service Story, and it's mostly about the thing the Secret Service was actually designed to do.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Now, most folks would never notice the tiny check letter and the faceplate number in the lower corner of every bill, but the Secret Service calls attention to them for identification purposes in its printed warnings of new counterfeits.

• 10:03Matt Bevan?

  Yeah, turns out the Secret Service was originally created to prevent the scourge of counterfeit money.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Another thing to look for are the sawtooth points on the coloured Treasury seal. On most counterfeits, they're blunt or rounded off. On the genuine, they're sharp.

• 10:20Matt Bevan?

  It took three presidential assassinations in 36 years, Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, before the government decided that it might be worth organising bodyguards for the chief executive.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Today, of course, watching over the president is the number one job of the Secret Service.

• 10:37Matt Bevan?

  In 1901, the Secret Service was the closest thing the federal government had to a national detective force. So protecting the president was just kind of added to their job description. It seems weird to give a bunch of guys who signed up to look at the corners of banknotes the job of safeguarding the president, but the FBI didn't exist at the time, so this is just what they decided to do.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Whether the president travels on water, on land, or in the air, the Secret Service is close by, prepared for any emergency.

• 11:10Matt Bevan?

  And even after the FBI was created, these jobs weren't reshuffled, which means that even now, a career as a Secret Service special agent generally means transferring backwards and forwards between protecting the president and investigating fraud and counterfeit money cases.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  The chief reminded me that protection of the president was our number one job, but he also said that suppression of counterfeiting and forgery was important too.

• 11:41Matt Bevan?

  They call it their dual mission, and look, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, having guys who are experts in what a president's head should look like on a dollar bill might be helpful in trying to protect the real life president's head from harm, but logical or not, it's an incredibly difficult job to qualify for. They have to pass extremely strict physical and mental tests and be able to meet the requirements to obtain top secret security clearance and sign a document saying they're willing to work anywhere in the world. This is all a very lengthy process.

• 12:22Matt Bevan?

  Recruitment, testing and training typically takes over a year, and then special agents are sent off for at least three years to a field office to check whether the spikes on the Treasury seal are pointy or rounded. Then, after all that, they're cleared to watch over the president. The point is, this whole process takes a very long time. So if an agent was to hypothetically not pay a Colombian sex worker and then create a very big and embarrassing scandal that resulted in them and many other agents being fired, replacing those agents would be an incredibly lengthy process. And well, that's exactly what happened in 2012.

• 13:07Matt Bevan?

  We have a zero tolerance policy for any kind of conduct of the kind that involves prostitution or anything of that nature. The Cartagena incident led to around a dozen agents leaving the Secret Service, which in the scheme of things, isn't a massive deal. The scandal brought an extra level of scrutiny onto the agency, which led to revelations like this one.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  In September of last year, a security contractor with an arrest record rode in an elevator with the president in Atlanta, armed with a gun, completely unbeknownst to the president's detail.

• 13:47Matt Bevan?

  Which is about as big an oversight as you can get. So let me tell you how that came about.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  Good afternoon, everybody. Please be seated.

• 13:55Speaker 06

  I want to thank Dr Frieden and everybody here at the Centre for Disease Control for welcoming me here today.

• 14:05Matt Bevan?

  When the president visits a government building like the CDC, the Secret Service sends a form to the agency asking for the details of any security personnel who will be on site and whether those personnel will be armed. The Secret Service then runs background checks on those people. On this occasion, the CDC filled out the form, listing the names of all of their security guards and stating that all of them would be armed. They returned the form to the Secret Service, but apparently it just sat on somebody's desk and nobody read it. So no background checks were run, and Obama's Secret Service detail thought that the security guards would not have guns.

• 14:48Matt Bevan?

  Despite this, when they arrived at the CDC, they handed out pins to all of the armed guards, which were meant to indicate that they had been vetted. One of those guys was Kenneth Tate, who had worked for the CDC for a decade.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  We got a radio call that the president was pulling in, that they were coming in, that said, everybody get a standby. So I go to the elevator and I prepare myself for them to enter, make sure everything is open and everything is standing by.

• 15:17Matt Bevan?

  Kenneth's job was to take Obama upstairs in the elevator.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  His staff got on the elevator, then he came and he got on the elevator. He acknowledged me, he asked me what my name was, and he extended his hand and shook my hand.

• 15:32Matt Bevan?

  Now, Kenneth had a record of arrests, but no convictions on domestic assault and firearms charges, which the Secret Service would have known had he been vetted. But there he was, in an elevator, with a loaded gun in his holster, standing right next to President Obama.

• 15:53Matt Bevan?

  Fortunately, Kenneth kept it in his pants, but this was not a good look for the Secret Service. And then, to make matters worse, two days later, this happened.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  The Secret Service is coming under renewed scrutiny after a man scaled the White House fence and made it all the way through the front door before he was apprehended.

• 16:12Matt Bevan?

  The man was apprehended in the East Room of the White House residence, like the bit of the building where the president sleeps. Obama wasn't there at the time, but still not great for the Secret Service. Every time an incident like this was uncovered, there were resignations. Morale at the agency was dropping, so even more people resigned. Eventually, congressional hearings began, looking into what was going on, and they found something staggering.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  The Secret Service at its peak had a staffing level of 7,024 employees. This was in 2011. That number declined every year until the beginning of this year, when the agency had 6,289 employees. But by all accounts, you're some 500 to 1,000 people short of where you should be.

• 17:06Matt Bevan?

  In 2015, a congressional report titled An Agency in Crisis was published, which showed that a massive contributing factor to the mistakes being made by the Secret Service was that staff were being forced to work ridiculous hours to make up for the swathe of resignations and the slow recruitment process. The following year was an election year, which meant that the Secret Service had to not only keep President Obama alive, but all of the candidates trying to succeed him, including this guy.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Whenever I go to places, I'd have two, three, four thousand bikes, and Secret Service would go crazy. I say, no, I'm so happy.

• 17:50Matt Bevan?

  Candidate Trump loved hanging out with armed bikers, despite the Secret Service advising that that was a bad idea.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  And Secret Service and all the law enforcement, they say, sir, I don't know if you're safe here. I say, I'm the safest guy in the world right here.

• 18:03Matt Bevan?

  At the end of that year, Congress took testimony from Secret Service agents to see how they were coping.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  And these are quotes, "During this year, I've missed holidays, birthdays and other life events. This has been ridiculous. It's far worse than 2012 campaign. Thankfully, I'm not..."

• 18:19Matt Bevan?

  Married, but if I was, I'd probably be divorced by now. Another agent, I average 43 days before I get a day off. It goes on and on.

• 18:29Matt Bevan?

  Now, Secret Service agents do get overtime pay. And at the time, their pay was limited to a maximum of $160,000 a year. And this overtime meant that many of the agents were hitting that cap hard. I've been one of the detailed leaders since beginning this campaign and I'm currently over $60,000 over my pay cap. My wife feels as though she's a single mother and there's no financial benefit. I'm not getting paid.

• 18:59Matt Bevan?

  In an attempt to alleviate the crisis, agents were pulled away from their important duty of, you know, looking at the cash through the microscope and pulled on to protection details, which meant that 2016 was a fantastic year to print fake money. Nobody was checking for it. The agents that were on duty were exhausted, burned out and grumpy that they had reached their pay caps. And so they were essentially doing unpaid overtime. Thankfully, there were no serious security incidents during the 2016 campaign, nor during the 2020 campaign. 2024, of course, was different. Take a look at what happened.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Secret Service agents rushed a bloodied Mr. Trump offstage. An attendee was killed and two others were critically injured.

• 19:58Matt Bevan?

  The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, led to the resignation of the Secret Service director.

• 20:05Speaker 07

  The assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump on July 13th is the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades.

• 20:14Matt Bevan?

  It was followed soon after by another incident.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Authorities allege the man was hiding in bushes near Donald Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• 20:23Matt Bevan?

  The gunman was hiding in bushes next to the sixth hole. Trump was playing on the fifth.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  They have an agent that jumps one hole ahead of time to where the president was at. And he was able to spot this rifle barrel sticking out of the fence and immediately engage that individual.

• 20:40Matt Bevan?

  Later investigations found that in 2024, the Secret Service was understaffed by more than 20%. The agents on Donald Trump's detail worked an average of 454 hours of overtime that year. That's the equivalent of 11 extra weeks of work on top of their normal workload. 1,973 Secret Service staff hit the pay cap that year. And so in 2025, the Secret Service started a recruitment drive.

• 21:10Speaker 07

  Sometimes being a hero means staying in the shadows. The United States Secret Service is calling for a few more heroes. Will you step forward?

• 21:20Matt Bevan?

  While hundreds of people signed up, very few will make it through the screening process. Also, they've got to look at counterfeit bills for a few years before they get to the White House. So the problem of understaffing isn't going to be fixed anytime soon. But look, the record of the Secret Service since the last presidential assassination in 1963 is pretty good. Aside from one of Ronald Reagan's ribs, one of his lungs and one of Donald Trump's ears, they have managed to keep every president and former president safe from physical harm for 63 years. But the trouble is, the kind of operations that the Secret Service is having to deal with are getting more complex.

• 22:07Matt Bevan?

  Lone gunmen used to be the only threat that presidents faced. But now it's groups of gunmen and guys like Asif Merchant.

• 22:19Matt Bevan?

  This is a video that was secretly recorded in 2024 in a hotel room in New York of Asif Merchant talking to a guy that he thinks is an assassin.

• 22:32Matt Bevan?

  He's explaining his plan to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally.

• 22:40Matt Bevan?

  To make sure the assassin understands his plan, Merchant pulls out a napkin and lays it on the table to represent the crowd of people at the rally. And then he uses some objects to represent Trump and some of the tall buildings which could be used for sniper positions.

• 22:57Matt Bevan?

  Now, it turned out that the assassin was in fact an FBI informant and Asif Merchant was later arrested. He has since testified at trial that he was an operative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, the IRGC, and that he was on a mission to hire a hitman to kill Donald Trump. He has been tried and found guilty of what has now been called the Napkin Plot. Over the next few months, another two men were arrested and indicted for working on behalf of the IRGC to hire hitmen in America. They said that they had also been ordered to kill Trump.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  An alleged Iranian plot to kill the president led to beefed up security ahead of last weekend's rally.

• 23:47Matt Bevan?

  All of these plots were apparently organised by the Revolutionary Guards as revenge for Trump killing one of their top commanders with an airstrike during his first term as president. And since Trump killed the Iranian Supreme Leader in an airstrike in February of this year, the IRGC is only ramping things up.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Let's go live now to Ankara, the Turkish capital, where the US President Donald Trump has just touched down for a crucial NATO summit there.

• 24:16Matt Bevan?

  In July this year, President Trump was the closest he has been to Iran since the beginning of the war back in February. He was less than 1,000 kilometres from the Iranian border. During the summit, he clearly had Iran on his mind.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  No, I'm number one on the kill list for Iran. They're lovely people, I'm number one.

• 24:35Matt Bevan?

  And the reason he was thinking about Iran trying to kill him is because according to the Israeli spy agency Mossad, that's exactly what they were trying to do at that exact moment. Mossad said that they had picked up signals intelligence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had an unusual amount of information about Trump's movements and sleeping arrangements at the NATO summit, and that an Iranian proxy militant in the area may have a shoulder-launched missile.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Officials determined there was a credible assassination threat against Donald Trump from Iran.

• 25:07Matt Bevan?

  The US officials reportedly were sceptical that such an attack could actually be pulled off, but the Secret Service decided not to risk it.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  The White House says it uses every tool at its disposal to address threats against the president.

• 25:21Matt Bevan?

  Trump boarded the Air Force One jumbo jet before being secretly loaded onto a catering truck and transported to another plane, which he then flew on to the UK.

• 25:31Speaker 07

  So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane, equal safety, but they wanted me to do it, so I do it. I do what they say.

• 25:44Matt Bevan?

  The entire American delegation flew out of Ankara safely with no evidence that any missiles were fired. But if this plot was real, that's an entire new level of threat. Until the last couple of years, the Secret Service's main fear was lone gunmen. But now they're reckoning with both alleged domestic terrorist attacks, but also international terrorist attacks orchestrated by the IRGC, who apparently have surface-to-air missiles and intelligence on where Trump sleeps. For every IRGC plot the Secret Service or FBI foil, another two will pop up in their place. They've got all the time in the world and they only have to succeed once.

• 26:32Matt Bevan?

  The thing is, complex potential threats like this are happening with increasing frequency. And as we've established, the Secret Service isn't exactly firing on all cylinders. So what's the solution? Well, the congressional report into the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, recommended that Congress and the Department of Homeland Security should consider separating the dual missions of the Secret Service. Stop making the president's bodyguards moonlight as the counterfeit money fraud squad. Mind you, that's been the obvious fix for like about a century. Now, does this 20 look fake to you?

• 27:19Matt Bevan?

  If you're listening, this is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. Audio production this week is by Anna John. Something you might not know about me is that I have four children. We pretty regularly go on quite long car trips and keeping them entertained can be tricky, which is why kids' podcasts are so great. ABC Kids Listen has some very fun and secretly educational podcasts. Your kids can unearth adventures with Costa on Gardening Australia Junior, explore big questions with Imagine This, or learn about the world with News Time. There's also great stuff for helping kids get sleep. I have used that particular part of the ABC Kids Listen catalogue quite extensively.

• 28:01Matt Bevan?

  All these podcasts and more are available for free in the Kids tab of ABC Listen or on the ABC Kids Listen app. I'll catch you on Thursday.