A federal watchdog is worried about fatigue among Secret Services agents, leading it to issue a “management alert” to Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy first made public Thursday afternoon.
While auditing Secret Service radio communications, “we identified officer safety issues that pose an immediate or potential danger to U.S. Secret Service officers and those whom they protect,” wrote John Roth, inspector general for the Homeland Security Department, under whose jurisdiction the Secret Service falls.
Roth said that his team “observed two officers sleeping at their posts.”
The Secret Service pushed back on the inspector general’s conclusion that the two snoozers are indicative of larger fatigue and staffing shortfalls.
“The Secret Service does not agree with the [Office of Inspector General’s] conclusion that these officers’ misconduct was due to fatigue caused by staffing and scheduling issues,” a Secret Service spokesman told the Washington Post. “We provided the OIG with factual corrections to their draft report. With these errors corrected, we fail to understand how the OIG could logically arrive at the same conclusion.”
The management alert is just the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of missteps by the agency assigned to protect the president, cabinet members, visiting foreign dignitaries and major events.
On Oct. 5, the inspector general reopened its “investigation into allegations that one or more Secret Service agents improperly accessed internal databases to look up the employment application of an individual who later became a member of Congress.
“The investigation was reopened as a result of Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy announcing that he now has a different recollection of the events in question than that he conveyed to Office of Inspector General investigators during his interview on July 17, 2015,” the inspector general’s office stated.
That investigation revolves around allegations that Secret Service personnel read and leaked information from now-Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s unsuccessful bid to join the agency. As House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, the Utah Republican has vigorously investigated incidents of wrongdoing by agents, such as hiring prostitutes while traveling with the president, and mission failure, such as when someone jumped the fence and made it all the way into the White House in 2014.
That incident prompted the routine audit of radio communications, which were partly blamed for the intruder getting so far, that led Roth’s investigators to find the dozing officers.
Clancy, a retired Secret Service agent, took over control of the agency last October after a series of blunders and embarrassing revelations befell the agency under his predecessor, Julia Pierson.
“I do think Joe Clancy has taken significant steps to improve staffing,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Thursday. “Clearly, this was an agency that was in need of strong leadership. And the president believes that Joe Clancy has provided just that.”
