If you thought the Secret Service was an elite force of razor-sharp marksmen, think again. A new DHS watchdog report says the agency has been sending out countersnipers who hadn’t even passed their shooting tests — but still assigned them to protect the President of the United States. It sounds like a bad parody of government incompetence, but this one’s real.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t rush to investigate the Secret Service’s failures on its own. It only launched this review after repeated assassination attempts against President Donald Trump last summer forced the agency into the spotlight. The most infamous came in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman managed to scale a building outside the perimeter and fire at Trump, grazing his ear and killing Corey Comperatore, a firefighter in the stands behind where Trump was speaking.
Now, nearly a year later, DHS’s internal watchdog has issued the first in what will be five reports evaluating the Secret Service. Its initial findings focus on the agency’s counter sniper unit — and the results are damning.
“The United States Secret Service’s Counter Sniper Team (CS) is staffed 73 percent below the level necessary to meet mission requirements,” the report concluded. “Failure to appropriately staff CS could limit the Secret Service’s ability to properly protect our Nation’s most senior leaders, risking injury or assassination, and subsequent national-level harm to the country’s sense of safety and security.”
In other words: the very team tasked with preventing tragedies like Butler is running on fumes.
The Inspector General found that the countersniper team has been so chronically understaffed that it routinely relies on extreme overtime and pulls agents from other DHS agencies just to cover events. In 2024 alone, countersnipers logged nearly 60,000 hours of overtime.
Even worse, some agents were deployed to protect high-level events without meeting mandatory weapons requalification standards — including both daytime and nighttime accuracy tests. Despite missing those requirements, these agents were still used for coverage at 47 of the 426 events attended by protectees in 2024.
The Secret Service did not dispute the report’s findings.
Staffing problems aren’t just about numbers — they’re also about pipeline. Agents cannot be hired directly into the countersniper role. They must first serve at least two years as regular agents (recently shortened to 18 months), which slows down recruitment. And despite the pool of highly skilled military snipers in the U.S., the agency is prohibited from hiring them directly into the unit.
The combination of chronic understaffing, bureaucratic hiring bottlenecks, and ignored training requirements paints a picture of an agency dangerously unprepared. After multiple brushes with tragedy, DHS is now admitting what many Americans suspected: the system tasked with protecting the president isn’t just strained — it’s broken.