The Secret Service's Real Secret
Last week, the federal
courts accomplished something no president, congressional committee, government
agency, or private organization has been able to: They said "no" to the Secret
Service.
The fight
over the "protective function privilege" has raised complicated, delicate, and
important questions about presidential privacy and the obligations of the
Secret Service. Is the Secret Service a Praetorian Guard that can abet an
imperial president in sleaze and coverup? How do we reconcile the president's
privacy with law enforcement's demands? While the courts have settled the legal
issue (for the moment), pundits continue to masticate these questions
dutifully.
But something is being overlooked in the privilege
squabble: other complicated, delicate, and even more important questions about
the Secret Service. Notably: Are there any limits on the amount of money we
will spend to protect the president? Is it healthy for a democracy to surround
its president with a bloated paramilitary security apparatus?
The real
worry about the Secret Service is not, as the privilege spat suggests, that the
president has too much control over it. The real worry is that no one
has control over it. The Secret Service's rise is one of the most remarkable
and unremarked stories of government in the last 40 years. In an age of open
and (ostensibly) frugal public administration, the Secret Service is an
anomaly, an agency that operates with nearly as much secrecy as the CIA and
spends almost as freely as its heart desires. How has this happened?
As David Greenberg chronicles in
Slate
's "Backstory," the Secret Service was established in 1865 to fight
counterfeiting. It began guarding the president regularly in 1901, after the
assassination of President William McKinley, but remained a modest enterprise
until John F. Kennedy's murder.
Since
then, the Secret Service has experienced the kind of growth that, well, only
stockholders in software companies have come to expect. In 1957, it spent $3.5
million and employed 450. This year, the Secret Service costs taxpayers about
$590 million and employs more than 4,600 people--including 2,000 special agents
(whose responsibilities include presidential protection) and 1,200 officers in
the Uniformed Division. (Click for more details about its proliferation.)
The Secret Service is evidence of the Iron Law of
Bureaucratic Growth: An agency unchecked by outside forces expands. The service
asks, and it is given. For fiscal 1999, it requested $594,657,000 in federal
funding (an increase of more than 5 percent over its $564 million base--it
receives about $30 million more in other appropriations). The House just passed
the Secret Service appropriations bill, and how much did the agency get?
Exactly $594,657,000.
Congress
stiffs other federal programs, but all the Secret Service's desires are
fulfilled: $6 million for four armor-plated limousines, $3 million for Y2K
conversion, millions to pay for extra travel expenses, $62 million to beef up
White House security, including new bulletproof windows, air defenses, and 27
extra security staffers. (Not that the public can find out much about how the
Secret Service spends its money: Details about how the president is protected
are classified. The agency has even removed White House floor plans from the
Library of Congress.)
The Secret Service is untouchable. Congress is
terrified of scrimping on it. "No one ever wants to not fully fund it," says a
congressional appropriations staffer. "No one ever wants to be the one who is
responsible for risk or danger to the president." Another staffer asks, "If
they say it's necessary for the safety of the president, who is going to say
no?" The media, too, are reluctant to criticize: The last major story to
question the Secret Service appeared in the New Republic in January
1981. (Two months later, Reagan was shot.) When the Secret Service does attract
notice, it tends to receive coverage best described as Protection Porn. (Click
for an explanation.)
The
Secret Service does not hesitate to exploit its Dead President advantage,
practicing an elegant variation of "Fireman First" (a classic bureaucratic
defense mechanism--when your budget is threatened, propose cutting the fire
department). On the rare occasions the service is queried, it invokes the Dead
President. A month after the Oklahoma City bombing, and without a hearing, the
Secret Service shut Pennsylvania Avenue and surrounding streets to traffic.
Washingtonians complained. The service declared it was necessary for the safety
of the White House and the president. The avenue stays closed.
The privilege squabble, in fact, marks the first time the
Dead President defense has failed. In Justice Department briefs and in private
meetings, the Secret Service insisted that the failure to recognize the
privilege: would result in "profound and predictable peril" to the president,
"could mean the difference between life or death," would endanger "the
integrity of our national security," etc. The appeals court rapped the agency
for its scare tactics, saying it must base its conclusions "on solid facts and
a realistic appraisal of the danger rather than on vague fears extrapolated
beyond any foreseeable threat."
The Secret
Service is not incompetent or corrupt, or even especially greedy. In fact, it
is almost universally admired for its professionalism and efficiency. Even so,
its ascendancy is troublesome. It has made standard--even admired--measures
that ought to be intolerable in a democracy. A half-century ago, a president
could drive through city streets in a normal car with a few bodyguards, and
anyone could stroll up to the front door of the White House. Of course, ours is
a different and more dangerous age: There are undoubtedly more and more
sophisticated threats to the president than we can imagine.
But the expansion of the Secret Service has
normalized a paramilitary presidency. No one blinks at: 40-car motorcades that
shut down interstates and gridlock traffic, the 200-plus-strong Secret Service
delegation that accompanies the president abroad, the transformation of the
open White House into an impenetrable fortress. During public events, it is
perfectly acceptable for Secret Service agents to approach crowd members and
yank their hands out of their pockets to confirm they are not hiding weapons.
It is unquestioned that the president should be chauffeured in a car that costs
$1.5 million . It has become a deep inconvenience for average citizens to
see their president, and a deep inconvenience for the president to see average
citizens. There is something unseemly about this excessive security, and
something undemocratic.
Sen.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., perhaps the only lawmaker who ever criticized
the Secret Service before the privilege flap, said in a 1992 Senate speech that
the agency has made the "insufferable" routine. "I don't know if the agency
itself is aware of how arrogant and presumptuous it has become." Two years ago,
Moynihan remarked that soon, the service will "have a billion-dollar budget.
And still just one president, one vice president."
It isn't that the Secret Service's precautions are
definitively unnecessary. It's that no one knows whether they are necessary and
no one is willing to ask. Perfection is impossible in presidential security. No
matter how much we spend, the goal will always recede. A determined assassin
will be able to find a way to kill the president. And the Secret Service will
be able to find a way to spend more money to prevent it. (In fact, the agency
seems to have found most of those ways already.)
No one
wants the president assassinated. But should it be forbidden to ask if we could
spend less and do less to protect him?
If you
missed the link to the Backstory on the Secret Service, here it is again.
Here's the , and here's the one on .
