f you did not know much about how and why bureaucracies fail, you would expect the Secret Service to be nearly failure-proof. It is a relatively small and manageable agency, with 6,500 employees, as opposed to the FBI’s 35,000-plus. It is well funded, its budget-to-employee ratio being more than $40,000 per year more than the FBI’s. It is narrowly focused: Though it was once an all-purpose domestic-intelligence agency, its various responsibilities have over the years been off-loaded to other agencies, leaving the Secret Service with only two major areas of responsibility — personal protection and a subset of financial crimes, mainly those involving counterfeiting and large-scale fraud, especially major cyber-shenanigans. It has sweeping powers to deploy in the pursuit of its mission, and its agents enjoy enormous prestige relative to their less-exalted colleagues in law enforcement. Other than its creepy name — a democratic republic should not have a domestic agency called the “Secret Service” — it has practically everything going for it. Except it doesn’t.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 22:28:31 +0000
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