A federal watchdog found that the Secret Service repeatedly failed to update its protection policies after security incidents, including drone breaches, leaving gaps that preceded the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The Government Accountability Office reviewed a decade of Secret Service security incidents and concluded that the agency charged with a "zero fail mission" let critical policy updates slip, failed to document why it chose not to act on known threats, and left a key interagency agreement untouched since 1991. The AP reported Thursday that the GAO identified 83 security incidents between 2015 and 2025. The Secret Service updated its protection policies after just 25 of them.
That means the agency looked at dozens of security breakdowns, and changed nothing in response to most of them. Worse, when it chose not to update policy, it left no written record explaining why.
The GAO singled out drone-related incidents as a particularly damaging example. As far back as 2015, a drone made contact with President Barack Obama's motorcade. That same year, a drone flew roughly 200 feet over a rally for then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Neither incident prompted the Secret Service to revise its protection policies, and neither triggered any documented explanation for standing pat.
Nathan Tranquilli, the GAO's acting director, called the drone incidents a "compelling example" of the agency's failure to document its reasoning when it decided not to change policy. Nine years later, at the Butler rally on July 13, 2024, the shooter flew a drone over the crowd for eleven minutes before positioning himself on an unsecured rooftop and opening fire. A bullet nicked Trump's ear.
The GAO report itself put the stakes in plain terms:
"Some of the missing information has been relevant to subsequent attacks."
That single sentence captures the cost of bureaucratic drift. Drone incursions flagged a vulnerability in 2015. The agency did not act on it. By 2024, an assassin exploited exactly that kind of gap.
The drone oversight was only one layer of the Butler breakdown. A separate finding in the GAO report, detailed by the Washington Examiner, revealed that the Secret Service received a specific warning about a possible assassination attempt on Trump ten days before the rally, and never shared it with local law enforcement partners responsible for securing the site.
The GAO attributed that failure to what it called a "siloed practice for sharing classified threat information." Secret Service personnel and local officers central to the rally's security plan were left in the dark about the threat. The shooter fired eight shots, grazing Trump's ear, killing one rally attendee, and injuring two others before a counter-sniper killed him.
Six Secret Service agents were later suspended without pay for periods ranging from 10 to 42 days following an internal review. Sen. Chuck Grassley put the failures in broader institutional terms:
"One year ago, a series of bad decisions and bureaucratic handicaps led to one of the most shocking moments in political history. The Secret Service's failure on July 13th was the culmination of years of mismanagement."
Grassley's assessment aligns with the GAO's own findings. The problems at Butler were not a one-day lapse. They grew from years of deferred policy updates, undocumented decisions, and fragmented communication, exactly the systemic patterns the watchdog flagged across the full 2015, 2025 review period.
Beyond the drone failures, the GAO found that the Secret Service failed to update eight of its 22 protection policies within the agency's own required four-year review cycle. The report did not name each policy, but the pattern is clear: the agency set its own standards for how often it should revisit its procedures, and then missed those deadlines more than a third of the time.
The agency has also faced scrutiny over internal misconduct and suspended officials in recent months, raising questions about whether the organizational problems run deeper than any single policy manual.
One of the starkest findings involved the memorandum of understanding between the Secret Service and the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service. That agreement spells out each agency's responsibilities for protecting the president during overseas travel. It requires annual review and update. It has not been touched since 1991, more than three decades. The GAO noted that the memorandum does not address newer threats, including drones.
Tranquilli offered context for how the agency fell so far behind:
"When you look at the Secret Service and you look at their mission, really it's a zero fail mission, and they've got a ton of challenges. When decisions were being made about where to put time and energy, some of these things fell to the side, and, as a result, there were some delays."
That explanation, that other priorities crowded out policy maintenance, may be understandable at a tactical level. But it is precisely the kind of institutional excuse that allows known vulnerabilities to fester until someone gets hurt.
Butler was not the last close call. Months after the assassination attempt, a man with a rifle got what the GAO described as "surprisingly close" to Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. Then, in April, an armed man breached security barriers at the White House Correspondents' Dinner while Trump was seated inside. The FAA has since moved to impose permanent flight restrictions near Mar-a-Lago based on Secret Service threat intelligence, a belated acknowledgment of the airspace vulnerabilities the GAO report highlighted.
Each incident reinforced the same conclusion: the agency's protection framework had not kept pace with the threats it faced. The Secret Service has previously been faulted for failing to relay critical threat information to the protective detail on the ground, a communication breakdown that mirrors the siloed intelligence-sharing the GAO identified as a systemic problem.
The GAO issued three recommendations. One requires the Secret Service to document its rationale whenever it reviews a security incident and decides not to update policy. The other two were not described in detail. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, agreed with all three and said it plans to implement changes.
A Secret Service spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
The agency has also contended with concerns about Iranian threats targeting members of the Trump family, adding another dimension to questions about whether its threat-response apparatus is functioning at the level the mission demands.
DHS's agreement with the GAO's recommendations is a start. But agreements on paper are what the Secret Service has been producing for years. The agency's own policies required four-year updates and annual memorandum reviews. It ignored both. The question now is whether this round of promised reforms will fare any differently, or whether the next GAO audit will find the same gaps, documented in the same polite language, after the next near-miss.
An agency with a "zero fail mission" does not get to treat policy maintenance as optional. Eighty-three incidents and one bullet-nicked ear later, that point should not require a federal report to make.
