The Secret Service in recent years has suffered from a litany of alcohol-related allegations and incidents, but the force tasked with protecting the president has a policy on intoxication that is more lenient than the drinking rules imposed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and even the Transportation Security Agency.
The service hit a new low this week with an accusation that, after a night of drinking, a pair of top-level agents drove into a White House barricade and may have run over a suspicious package that was being investigated as a potential threat.
Normally such news out of the elite agency charged with protecting the president and the first family would carry a sense of shock and awe. But last week’s alleged booze-fueled calamity only led to more eye-rolling and hand-wringing in Washington, where Secret Service scandals have made regular headlines for months.
“Add this to the list of embarrassments,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and led the charge to investigate misconduct at the agency last fall after a string of incidents.
Just weeks into his new role as the director of the Secret Service, Joseph Clancy is under pressure to react to the latest incident with a strong signal that the same type of misconduct that tarnished the agency’s reputation over the last few years must come to an end. The question now is whether Clancy, a 26-year veteran of the agency, will tighten penalties on drinking and other misconduct on his longtime colleagues and friends.
Last year, after two successive alcohol-related incidents involving its special operations division came to light, that division of the Secret Service changed its rules about when agents are allowed to drink before duty and on presidential trips.
Anyone assigned to the special operations division is prohibited from drinking within 12 hours of starting a shift and within 24 hours of a president’s arrival on a trip.
But the set of disciplinary actions Secret Service agents could face for alcohol-related incidents remains the same, and far lower than alcohol-related misconduct rules for FBI agents and TSA air marshals.
Agency officials say their hands are tied because the federal government provides agents worker protections that the FBI, TSA and other national security agencies don’t offer.
Regular Secret Service agents, like most in the federal government, can appeal adverse agency personnel decisions and disciplinary actions to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, which imposes limits on the punishment different departments can dole out for certain misconduct.
Several national security agencies, such as the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division have opted out of the system, claiming they need the efficiency and flexibility to evaluate and dole out their own punishments in order to perform their missions and maintain good order and discipline.
A Secret Service spokesman declined to say why the agency didn’t replicate other national security agencies’ actions and exempt their agents from the federal civilian worker protections as well.
If the FBI and the TSA’s air marshals are even charged with drunken driving, they receive an automatic 30-day suspension without pay, and the penalties go up from there for a conviction.
In 2009, the TSA began imposing the suspensions without pay on drunk-driving charges, arrests, or refusing a sobriety test in order to bring their punishments in line with other law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, according to a ProPublica report.
There is no mandatory minimum penalty for a Secret Service agent charged with drunken-driving, although a conviction results in a “standard” penalty of 45 days suspension without pay, according to a Secret Service spokesman.
Considering the more intense scrutiny surrounding the Secret Service right now, experts suggest that even being a passenger in a government car when the other agent was driving under the influence of alcohol could subject the passenger to a charge of displaying a lack of judgment or failing to prevent the driver from driving under the influence.
The Secret Service has a long record of imposing alcohol-related punishments unevenly. Over the past five years, the agency had nine total incidents involving agents or officers charged with drunk driving, according to a Secret Service report outlining misconduct obtained by the Washington Examiner. It has had 27 other alcohol-related incidents that required some sort of disciplinary review.
In six of the nine drunken-driving cases, the Secret Service employees charged received less than a 30-day suspension and received only a warning about the potential ramifications to their top-secret security clearances.
Experts say that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies after the Sept. 11 attacks started imposing new disciplinary measures to respond to the increased domestic terrorism threat and the more serious law enforcement environment it produced.
Tony Schiena, a security expert who operates the private military intelligence firm MOSAIC and works with several government law enforcement agencies including the FBI, says accountability is enforced so strongly at the bureau “that everyone is looking over their own shoulder trying to make sure they haven’t done anything wrong or worried that a colleague will report them if they have.”
At the FBI, he said, “there is accountability for everything and they are also very competitive. If you break the law and you’re not following protocol, it’s reported.”
“Post-9/11 things have become a lot stricter in the handling of their agents,” he said.
