[House Hearing, 114 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
OVERSIGHT OF THE SECRET SERVICE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 15, 2016
__________
Serial No. 114-168
__________
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah, Chairman
JOHN L. MICA, Florida ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland,
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio Ranking Minority Member
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
JIM JORDAN, Ohio ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
TIM WALBERG, Michigan Columbia
JUSTIN AMASH, Michigan WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
SCOTT DesJARLAIS, Tennessee JIM COOPER, Tennessee
TREY GOWDY, South Carolina GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia
BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas TAMMY DUCKWORTH, Illinois
CYNTHIA M. LUMMIS, Wyoming ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan
MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina TED LIEU, California
RON DeSANTIS, Florida BONNIE WATSON COLEMAN, New Jersey
MICK MULVANEY, South Carolina STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands
KEN BUCK, Colorado MARK DeSAULNIER, California
MARK WALKER, North Carolina BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania
ROD BLUM, Iowa PETER WELCH, Vermont
JODY B. HICE, Georgia MICHELLE LUJAN GRISHAM, New Mexico
STEVE RUSSELL, Oklahoma
EARL L. ``BUDDY'' CARTER, Georgia
GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin
WILL HURD, Texas
GARY J. PALMER, Alabama
Jennifer Hemingway, Staff Director
Andrew Dockham, General Counsel
Michael Howell, Counsel
Sharon Casey, Deputy Chief Clerk
David Rapallo, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on November 15, 2016................................ 1
WITNESSES
Mr. Tom Dougherty, Chief Strategy Officer, U.S. Secret Service
Oral Statement............................................... 9
Written Statement............................................ 12
Brigadier General Kevin Nally, Retired, Chief Information
Officer, U.S. Secret Service
Oral Statement............................................... 19
The Hon. John Roth, Inspector General, U.S. Department of
Homeland Security
Oral Statement............................................... 19
Written Statement............................................ 22
The Hon. Patrick P. O'Carroll, Jr., Executive Director, Federal
Law Enforcement Officers Association
Oral Statement............................................... 36
Written Statement............................................ 38
APPENDIX
Hearing Follow-up Response submitted by Mr. Roth, Inspector
General, Department of Homeland Security....................... 76
OVERSIGHT OF THE SECRET SERVICE
----------
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
House of Representatives,
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
Washington, D.C.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:44 a.m., in Room
2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jason Chaffetz
[chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Chaffetz, Duncan, Jordan, Walberg,
Amash, Gosar, Gowdy, Massie, Meadows, Mulvaney, Buck, Blum,
Hice, Carter, Grothman, Palmer, Cummings, Maloney, Norton,
Clay, Lynch, Connolly, Lawrence, Lieu, Watson Coleman,
Plaskett, Welch, and Lujan Grisham.
Chairman Chaffetz. Good morning. The Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform will come to order.
Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a
recess at any time.
My apologies for the delay. We had testimony I needed to
give in the Natural Resources Committee, and I appreciate your
patience.
We have a very important hearing here. We've done a series
of hearings on the Secret Service. And, first and foremost, let
me thank the ranking member on the bipartisan way in which
we've been moving forward dealing with this very sensitive
subject.
The Secret Service has not been subject to much oversight
over the last few decades, but it is a vital part of the
mission of the United States Congress, and I think it is a
good, healthy thing for all of us to do.
First and foremost, I want to congratulate the Secret
Service for going through a very tough, rigorous, long campaign
season with an immense amount of travel and work. And, by any
account, Secret Service has had a good year. Everything from
the election to the visit from the Pope, there are a host of
things that the Secret Service has been called on to do--the
United Nations. There's a lot of praise that is due to the men
and women who are on the front lines.
But we have to deal with some realities of things that
we've pointed out over the last couple of years. And so this
hearing is going to touch on a variety of topics, but, first
and foremost, I want to start and end by thanking the men and
women who are doing this hard work.
By our estimation, almost every single agent in the Secret
Service has performed overtime for which they have not been
compensated. And I want those of you that are watching to
digest this. We know the men and women are committed to this
mission, but it is terribly unfair to not receive compensation
for doing so. This is not a volunteer job. And when you take
yourself and put your life on the line to protect others and
protect this Nation, when you're away from your family or just
away, away, away, you should get compensated for that, and we
need to address that.
We have other problems that need to be fixed. And I know
members on both sides of the aisle have questions about the
mission of the Secret Service, because one of their prime
missions is about cybersecurity. And there are, I think, very
legitimate questions, I have deep questions, about the
protective mission as well as the cyber mission, because it is
taking the majority of the time to engage in the cyber mission.
And we'll talk some more about that.
And then one thing that is terribly frustrating and we will
not tolerate on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee
and the Congress, and that is the lack of cooperation in doing
our own investigation and working with the Secret Service. You
do not get to hide things. That is not an option for the Secret
Service. And yet we continue to deal with this, and we've
issued subpoenas that have not been responded to, and that is
just simply not acceptable.
But let's go through some of the details. According to data
provided to the committee, 1,077 employees, 90 percent of whom
are agents, worked unpaid overtime hours in support of the
Presidential election in 2016.
Now, there are many law enforcement agencies that enforce
caps on paid overtime for their hardworking personnel, and I am
not suggesting today that these caps should be totally
disregarded or permanently lifted for the Secret Service. You
know, we've had a number of hearings, we had a panel that was
assembled, outside individuals who came together and talked
about the improper staffing levels that have led to this.
The Secret Service at its peak had a staffing level of
7,024 employees. This was in 2011. That number declined every
year until the beginning of this year, when the agency had
6,289 employees. The staffing numbers are beginning to improve
and are now at 6,507 employees, with 3,300 special agents,
1,400 Uniformed Division officers, and roughly 1,700
administrative and technical personnel.
But, by all accounts, you're some 500 to 1,000 people short
of where you should be. And you can't just go grab somebody,
hand them a gun, and say, hey, go protect the President or go
protect the White House. You can't do that. I recognize that it
is difficult to vet, train, and get somebody all the way
through the process without them dropping out. We want the best
of the best. But there is a problem that snowballs, in that
when you don't have the proper staffing levels, you are leaning
on people to go through some tremendous efforts.
We have some stories that were provided to us that I want
to read some excerpts of, okay? These are agents serving in
various parts of the country, and these are quotes.
``During this year, I've missed holidays, birthdays, and
other life events. Often, I've been back off my campaign
rotation, I've been grabbed for in-town protective assignments
or out-of-town assignments for POTUS or VPOTUS. In total, I've
been out of the district and away from home for close to 8
months this year.''
An agent in Chicago: ``During this campaign, by the end of
the year, I will have exceeded my pay cap by close to $25,000.
I've been on almost every campaign rotation and back-to-back
travel assignments. The pace has been terrible. I can't even
remember the last time I've been in the office for 2 days in a
row. This has been ridiculous. It's far worse than the 2012
campaign. Thankfully, I'm not married, but if I was, I'd
probably be divorced by now.''
Here's another agent: ``I've been in the Secret Service for
almost 25 years and been involved in every campaign since I've
been on the job. We thought the 2000 campaign was the worst,
but this makes all the past campaigns pale in comparison. I've
been one of the detail leaders since beginning this campaign,
and I'm currently over $60,000 over my pay cap. This is on top
of the normal amount of salary I don't receive due to the pay
cap, which I expect to lose money on during the non-campaign
year. This has been rubbing salt in the wound.
``We give all we have, our lives completely disrupted, and
we don't see any benefit from the sacrifice. We're losing
people. Recruiting has been tough to do, as not many want to do
this job. And we are doing nothing to incentivize people to
apply or to stay. I have colleagues that were on the same level
that have left the job for private-sector opportunities. This
never happened in the past, and it should be a wake-up call to
headquarters and the Hill about the cost-and-benefit analysis.
Making the Service does nothing to combat the sentiment that
sacrifice is just not worth it.''
Another agent: ``My wife keeps asking me what is the
benefit, and I don't have an answer.''
Another agent: ``We are busier than ever. Staffing has
become rolling people from one assignment to another with no
break. We're all at near our pay cap, which adds to the
frustration. I've had things in my house I can't fix I've had
to pay someone else to do. I've had an increase in my lawn
service contract to do things I would normally do. My children
don't see me.''
Another agent: ``I'm $25,000 over my pay cap. My average
workweek is 90 hours. I'm away from my family for weeks at a
time, missing out on various functions for school-age children.
My wife feels as though she's a single mother, and there's no
financial benefit. I'm not getting paid.''
Another agent: ``Every hour of OT worked is not paid. I
don't get paid for the work that I do.''
Another agent: ``I average 43 days before I get a day
off.''
It goes on and on. My guess is if we sat down with every
agent, they've got the same story. And that has to change.
That's a management problem. That's not an agent in the field's
problem; that is a management problem.
And one of the things that we see is you can't even tell us
how many hours they worked and how much they are due in
overtime. Because last time we talked, you didn't even have a
system to track this sort of thing.
So we have got to solve this. I don't want to create a
long-term incentive and say, hey, we're just going to pay this
in perpetuity forever. You've got to have the tools to actually
solve it. It is dangerous to the President, the Vice President,
the incoming President, their family, to have somebody who is
working a 90-hour week, who's tired, exhausted--and not getting
paid? That's not a formula for success, ladies and gentlemen.
That has to be solved.
The Secret Service has developed and begun implementing a
human capital plan that will increase its staffing level to
between 8,000 and 9,000 employees by the next Presidential
election in 2020. So we have 6,500 now, but trying to get to
8,000 to 9,000 people, and we want to hear about how you're
going to do this.
In the meantime, I do plan to introduce legislation--in
fact, I did it last night--that will raise the cap for the 2016
election cycle, providing back pay for uncompensated overtime.
To the men and women who are watching this, there is relief if
we can get this bill passed. And we want to make sure that you
get paid for your overtime. I don't know that we can pay for
every single hour of every single thing. I don't know that the
Secret Service can even track it. But that is what we're trying
to do.
The Secret Service staffing problems are not caused solely
by funding issues. In fact, it should be noted that Congress
has enacted more funding than the preceding year every single
year in a row, with the exception of the year 2006--or since
2006. With one exception, every year, Secret Service budget has
gone up, but the staffing levels have gone down. What does that
tell you? It tells you that we're not taking care of the
staffing levels that should be there, and that is on the Secret
Service itself.
Concerns also remain as Secret Service employees are
burdened by their increasing nonessential investigative and
cyber-related missions that may distract from the core mission
of protecting the President and other protectees.
If you average it out--and it's not true for every person,
but if you take the 60,000 feet and you average it out, agents
spend about one-third of their time in protection-related
activities during non-Presidential election years. Protection-
related activities increase to about half their time during
Presidential election times, which begs the question: Could we,
with the existing force, if they were just doing the protective
mission, which is a massive important mission to the United
States, could they cover all of this without having to have 90-
hour to 100-hour workweeks? The answer is, yes, we think we
could actually get there.
If the Secret Service focused all of its resources on the
protective mission, then the overtime issue before us may not
be there at all. I will continue to work with members on both
sides of the aisle to figure out how we actually do this.
Casting further doubt on the Secret Service maintaining two
separate and distinct missions are issues raised by the
Inspector General report critical of the Secret Service's
handling of its own information technology systems. The DHS
Inspector General, who is here with us today, recently found
that the Secret Service's information technology systems, which
contain a wealth of extremely sensitive information, are,
quote, ``vulnerable to unauthorized access and disclosure,''
end quote.
A DHS OIG employee who met with our staff referred to the
Secret Service IT systems as the worst in all of Homeland
Security. And yet they're supposed to be the ones protecting
the Nation from everything that we do. And a lot of people do a
lot of good work, but that mission is growing and expanding and
it's going global. It's already gone global. It went global a
long time ago.
The employee indicated the audit should have only taken a
few days but it took months because of how unsecure the systems
were and because the Secret Service lacked basic information
technology security knowledge.
Matters are made worse by the troubling culture of
mishandling sensitive information. Additionally, when meeting
with Homeland Security and Secret Service officials, we learned
the improper access and disclosure of sensitive information was
so commonplace that Secret Service employees didn't even know
it was against the rules to do so.
This is how arcane the Secret Service process is.
Applicants must email sensitive background forms that the
Secret Service then prints, stores, and then manually re-inputs
them into the system. Do you know how many man-hours are wasted
on that, doing that in that system? We have asked the Inspector
General to investigate.
If the Secret Service is committed to reform, then the
agency must also be committed to ensuring top leadership is
above reproach and worthy of respect from those that they lead.
They are one of the most revered law enforcement agencies on
the planet, but after we saw Cartagena, Secret Service
employees believed there was a double standard for top
leadership, that depending on who you knew and what your
position was, you could be promoted despite misconduct. It is
imperative that this belief be completely wiped clean in order
to truly transform the agency.
Currently, the Secret Service is refusing to imply with the
duly-issued subpoena. The documents in question contain serious
misconduct at the senior-most levels of the agency. On May 20,
we requested information related to any past misconduct
committed or alleged by senior officials at the GS-15 level or
above. On September 2, given their nonresponse, we issued a
subpoena for those documents. Today, the production is still
not complete.
We did receive a trove of documents late last night--we
shouldn't have to have a hearing to compel that--but the names
have been redacted. The names have been redacted. We can't
conduct this. We can't do our proper oversight with all the
redactions. On this one page here, I can show you, there's 22
redactions on one page of duly-issued-subpoenaed material.
The committee understands there are more than 40--40--
officials, of roughly a universe of about 300, there are
roughly 40 individuals out of 300 at the GS-15 level or above,
including a recently promoted assistant director who had
misconduct in their personnel record, either alleged or proven.
Based on materials the committee has reviewed, the
misconduct in question includes transmitting hardcore
pornography on government computers, racially charged messages,
visiting strip clubs during working hours using government
vehicles, impersonating an FBI agent or DEA agent, improper
relationships within the workforce, domestic violence, and
sexist conduct.
The committee has long held that senior leaders must be
held to the same standard as the rank-and-file employees.
The reason this was highlighted is because, when given a
survey, anonymous survey, the Secret Service employees told us
only 22 percent--22 percent--of the Secret Service employees
believed that senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty
and integrity. Think about that. More than 79 percent of Secret
Service employees don't believe that senior leaders act
honestly and with integrity.
Of course we're going to look into this. That's one of the
most stunning numbers we've ever seen pop out at us on these
surveys. And there's a reason we do these surveys, is so we can
highlight this. But we don't know if you've cleaned this up. We
don't know if you've helped solve this. And it's not good
enough to just say, ``Oh, yeah, we're addressing it,'' when you
won't share the information with the committee.
There have been some positive reforms. This committee's
bipartisan December 15 report and the December 2014 Blue Ribbon
Panel report made extensive recommendations for reform. The
Secret Service has taken steps to implement these
recommendations and begun to correct its mistakes.
But until the Secret Service takes seriously the character
of its own senior leadership, it cannot hope to recruit and
retain the type of workforce it needs to regain its prestigious
position as history has known. The committee is dedicated to
reforming the agency to make sure it is as successful as
possible and is a zero-fail mission.
Again, we appreciate the good work of the men and women who
have gone through a very rigorous campaign schedule. But that
has not let up; they still have a lot of protection to do. And
we thank them for that service.
We will now recognize the ranking member.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I'm
glad that we are having this hearing.
To the men and women of the Secret Service, I too join the
chairman in thanking you for all that you do in protecting the
President and the other protectees and addressing issues that
are very, very difficult.
When you think about working and not being paid and, at the
same time, having to go home to a family who has not been able
to spend the time that they want to spend with you, and then
when you look at your paycheck, you're not even compensated for
that time. So I join the chairman with regard to trying to make
sure that we retroactively raise the cap so that Secret Service
agents, employees, might be properly compensated.
Since the beginning of this Congress, I've joined with the
chairman to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the Secret
Service--the good, the bad, and the ugly. Working together, we
issued a bipartisan report last year that documented the
cultural problems in the agency and detailed specific incidents
of abuse by agents who went astray.
But we also did something else extremely important. We
documented how staffing levels at the Secret Service dropped
off a cliff after significant budget cuts were imposed by
sequestration. Let me read to you what our report said, and I
quote: ``The crisis began after 2011, when the number of
employees began to decline sharply, and the decline continued
across all categories of employment,'' end of quote.
One of the top causes we identified was the, quote,
``significant cuts imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011,''
end of quote. That was the bipartisan, unanimous finding of
this committee. Through sequestration, Republicans in Congress
slashed the budget of the Secret Service, and we're still
feeling the consequences of those budget cuts on the men and
the women who devote their lives to protecting the President
and many other officials.
After recognizing this massive problem, we also proposed a
bipartisan solution. In our bipartisan report, we made 29 joint
recommendations, and one of them read as follows, and I quote:
``Congress should ensure that Secret Service has sufficient
funds to restore staffing to required levels, and the Secret
Service should ensure that it has systems in place to achieve
these goals.''
Now, I agree with the chairman. It's one thing to deal with
the staffing; it's another thing to make sure that all of the
support systems are in place. There has been a lot of research
done with regard to the Secret Service, a lot of
recommendations, but we do have a duty to make sure that the
Secret Service is carrying out those recommendations and
carrying them out in a timely fashion.
Unfortunately, the problem we now face is that some
apparently feel that these words mean little, and they will not
support additional funding, by the way, for the Secret Service
beyond this year to increase staffing or even to keep the
staffing they have.
As we all know, 2016 has been a year of extraordinary
demands and strain on the Secret Service. I thought the
chairman did an excellent job of laying out some of those
concerns. Recent reports indicate that more than 1,000 Secret
Service agents--one-third of the agents--have worked so many
hours that they are now maxed out of their overtime and salary
and are prohibited by current law from receiving any additional
overtime pay. Some agents started working overtime for free as
early as June and are exceeding the pay cap by $50,000 or
$60,000.
But this happens every 4 years. Every Presidential campaign
year--and we know this in advance--significant hours of
overtime are required for the Republican and Democratic
National Conventions and for around-the-clock protection of the
Presidential candidates and their families. This year, the
Secret Service had to provide security at two additional major
events: the United Nations General Assembly and the Nuclear
Security Summit.
As our bipartisan report showed, Secret Service agents have
been leaving at historic rates. One senior agent explained how
agents had their lives, and I quote, ``completely disrupted and
don't see any benefit from the sacrifice.'' That's a very sad
commentary.
And as the chairman stated when he talked about this
person, he also said: ``We're losing people. Recruiting has
been tough to do, as not many want to do this job, and we are
doing nothing to incentivize people to apply or stay,'' end of
quote.
The men and women of the Secret Service put their lives on
the line every day because they love our country. I have talked
to Secret Service agents who have said to me that they're
willing to take a bullet for the President--willing to take a
bullet. And we ought to be able to compensate them.
They endure high-stress, 16-hour workdays. They're away
from their families for weeks at a time. They miss birthdays,
holidays, anniversaries, and time with their children. That's
time that they will never be able to recover. They make extreme
sacrifices, and they should get paid for the time they work.
How in the world can we expect to address the major
recruitment and retention challenges at the Secret Service if
we're not even paying them for the hours they serve? Raising
the salary caps only for 2016 is not enough. This is not a new
issue. It comes up every election cycle, and we need a
permanent solution.
For these reasons, I'm introducing a bill that would create
a permanent fix by raising the annual pay cap for every
Presidential campaign year. And the Secret Service need to know
that in advance. They need to know that we've dealt with this
and that they're going to be okay and their families are going
to be okay. And if we want to address the issue of morale, I
can see no better way to do that.
So it is Congress' duty to consistently fund the Secret
Service's most mission-critical areas. And we must take action,
and we must take action now.
Finally, I am very encouraged that the Secret Service has
been making progress implementing our recommendations and those
of the Protective Mission Panel. Just this morning, the
Department of Homeland Security Inspector General issued a new
report commending the Secret Service on the significant strides
they have been making. However, the report warns that full
implementation will, and I quote, ``depend heavily on adequate
funding and staffing,'' end of quote.
This is a warning for us here in this committee and every
Member of Congress. I've often said that I want the Secret
Service to be the elite among the elite. I want that reputation
that the protective armor that they have cannot be pierced,
because I think that that in and of itself, that reputation in
and of itself, is a deterrent from anybody trying to do
something to harm the President or the other officials.
And so I urge my Republican colleagues to support my bill
and to show the American people that this committee can do more
than just talk, that we can act to address the problems swiftly
and provide a permanent solution, but, more importantly, to say
to the Secret Service that we appreciate you and we want to
make sure that you receive every penny that you have earned.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
We'll hold the record open for 5 legislative days for any
members who would like to submit a written statement.
We'll now recognize our panel of witnesses. We're pleased
to welcome Mr. Tom Dougherty, Chief Strategy Officer at the
United States Secret Service; Brigadier General Kevin Nally,
retired, Chief Information Officer at the United States Secret
Service; the Honorable John Roth, Inspector General, the
Department of Homeland Security; and the Honorable Patrick
O'Carroll, executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement
Officers Association.
Gentlemen, we thank you for being here.
Pursuant to committee rules, all witnesses are to be sworn
before they testify. If you will please rise and raise your
right hand.
Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are
about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth?
Thank you. You may be seated.
Let the record reflect that all witnesses answered in the
affirmative.
In order to allow time for discussion, we'd appreciate it
if you would limit your oral testimony to 5 minutes. Your
entire written record will be made part of the record.
Mr. Dougherty, you're now recognized for 5 minutes. And,
please, pull that microphone up close and make sure it's on.
Thank you very much.
WITNESS STATEMENTS
STATEMENT OF TOM DOUGHERTY
Mr. Dougherty. Thank you, Chairman Chaffetz, Ranking Member
Cummings.
I apologize first. I'm under the burden of a cold, so I
apologize for a little bit of the voice issue. But let me
start.
Good morning, Chairman Chaffetz, Ranking Member Cummings,
and distinguished members of the committee. I am proud to
appear before you today alongside Secret Service's Chief
Information Officer, my colleague Kevin Nally, a recent
acquisition by Secret Service, to discuss a broad range of
ongoing reforms in betterment of the agency.
It is our honor to represent the men and women of the
Secret Service at the conclusion of the 2016 Presidential
campaign. Through the exceptional commitment, dedication, and
selfless sacrifices of our workforce, the Service has
successfully performed one of its most important
responsibilities to the Nation, that of protecting Presidential
candidates and Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees.
One week removed from the general election, we continue to
look ahead as we prepare for the Presidential inaugural and
beyond.
As with the generations that preceded us, all of us, our
more than 6,500 employees demonstrated a level of
professionalism and commitment upon which the reputation of our
agency has been built historically. I appreciate the
opportunity to speak today about these accomplishments, as well
as the challenges ahead and the efforts that the Director and
the staff have undertaken to ensure that the Secret Service is
an agency that does continuously improve.
The agency began preparation and training for candidate
operations in the summer of 2015--a long time ago now, it
seems--at the direction of the Secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security and, after consultation with the
Congressional Advisory Committee, initiated protection of
candidates in November of 2015.
As part of our campaign efforts, we also provided security
for three Presidential debates as well as one Vice Presidential
debate.
In the course of this election year, the Service
coordinated security for over 2,500 candidate trips, during
which approximately 4 million people went through magnetometer
screening in order to protect the American political process.
Protection is a collaborative effort, and we are fortunate
to have the support of a number of partners over the past year.
Particularly, we work with our DHS colleagues at Homeland
Security Investigations--that's HSI--Transportation Security
Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as well as
State and local public safety agencies throughout the country
to ensure protection for these candidates. And we thank them
for their critical support. We could not do our job without
State and local law enforcement.
Amidst candidate operations, the agency coordinated five
national special security events over this particular year--and
then, of course, the Pope just prior to that time, as well.
That's six.
While Federal, State, and local partners from across the
government supported these NSSEs, as envisioned in Presidential
directives, I am proud to say that these events also
demonstrated a tremendous unity of effort--or unity-of-
government effort within the Department.
These NSSEs included the State of the Union, the 2016
Nuclear Security Summit, the Republican and Democratic National
Conventions, and, of course, the 71st United Nations General
Assembly in New York.
Beyond the operational achievements of the past year and a
half, Director Clancy has rebuilt the Secret Service's command
structure and implemented policies to increase transparency and
communication between senior leaders, supervisors, and the rank
and file across our agency. Many of these changes were
recommendations made by the independent Protective Mission
Panel as well as this committee.
The work of the PMP led the Secret Service to examine how
we lead the organization, how we train for and conduct
operations, and how we engage with every member of the
workforce.
One year after the PMP issued this report, the Secret
Service invited the panel members from the PMP back to our
headquarters to meet with Director Clancy to discuss the
progress we had made and to get their input, genuinely, to
ensure that our actions and intended direction were consistent
with the intent of their recommendations. Their positive
response to our progress was encouraging. Our job is not
finished, though, of course, with that.
The DHS Office of Inspector General recently reviewed the
Secret Service's progress in implementing the recommendations
of the PMP. In its report, the OIG stated, ``The Secret Service
has clearly taken the PMP's recommendations seriously, which it
has demonstrated by making a number of significant changes.''
The DHS OIG went on to note that ``fully addressing some of the
PMP recommendations will take considerable time. It is a
sustained effort, funding and stakeholder support''--your
support. We appreciate the OIG's assessment and concur with the
five recommendations that he has put forward to us.
In addition to Mr. Roth's report, we have actively sought
assessments and feedback from external sources, among them,
most recently, as published today, the National Academy of
Public Administration, which helped us identify ways to build
and complete additional actions related to both the PMP and
also the HOGR report.
The Secret Service is committed to a sustained, long-term
effort of continual improvement. During our work to address the
PMP recommendations, we have addressed concerns raised in the
committee's report, which include changes in Secret Service
leadership and the structure of our organization fundamentally,
profoundly; hiring and retaining personnel; and the budgeting
of our own mission needs to sustain the operations based on
what it costs.
With the 2016 Presidential campaign behind us, our
employees continue to meet the significant requirements of the
mission in the face of our ever-changing threat environment.
Under Director Clancy's leadership, we will continue to support
all of our employees as we build our hiring and retention
initiatives--there are many--and fight to provide them with the
commensurate compensation for the long hours that they work on
behalf of the American people. We have made tremendous strides
in fulfilling these. We bring the same focus to the
recommendations made by this committee.
On behalf of Director Clancy and his executive staff, I
would like to thank the men and women of the Secret Service for
their hard work and sacrifices this entire year. The agency has
a proud tradition of operational excellence and
professionalism. I know the Director is deeply committed to the
workforce and will continue to do everything he can.
Chairman Chaffetz, Ranking Member Cummings, and members of
the committee, that concludes my testimony, and I do welcome
your questions going forward.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Dougherty follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
Mr. Nally, you're now recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF BRIGADIER GENERAL KEVIN NALLY, RET.
General Nally. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this
opportunity.
I actually do not have a written statement, but I would
like to caveat and say: The state of IT within the Secret
Service is taken very seriously by the Director, his staff, and
the entire Secret Service.
For the record, I was not with the Service when this
information happened in the OIG report. However, I'd be happy
to talk to you about what I've done, with Mr. Clancy's support,
to fix what is in the OIG report.
We've made significant organizational improvements in late
December 2015, and the successes during each national special
security event are a testimony to mission accomplishment, our
current leadership in place, and our continual progress for
system security and a continued focus on supporting a mobile
workforce.
Thank you, sir.
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
The Inspector General, Mr. Roth, you're now recognized for
5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. JOHN ROTH
Mr. Roth. Chairman Chaffetz, Ranking Member Cummings, and
members of the committee, thank you for inviting me here today
to testify.
The Secret Service has taken action to address the concerns
and challenges identified by our office, the Protective Mission
Panel, and this committee. Although we have seen encouraging
progress, many of the implemented changes will require long-
term commitment and planning. We will continue to monitor the
Secret Service's progress in implementing our recommendations
and that of the PMP over time.
In our most recent report, released today, we looked at the
Secret Service's progress in meeting the Protective Mission
Panel's 19 recommendations that it made in December 2014. We
found that the Secret Service has clearly taken the panel's
report seriously, and Director Clancy has shown a strong
commitment to fully implementing the panel's recommendations.
For example, one of the panel's major findings was that the
Secret Service had never developed a budget process that
articulated its mission or a corresponding staffing and budget
plan to meet its needs. This meant, as its operational tempo
has increased, the Secret Service often fixed short-term
problems at the expense of long-term ones, such as deferring
technology refreshes to pay for operational travel or paying
large amounts of overtime rather than fixing the hiring
process. To cure this, the Secret Service has for the first
time developed a mission-based budget for fiscal 2018, which
should address many of the causes of equipment and personnel
shortfalls.
The Secret Service has also taken actions or plans to act
on the panel's recommendations related to staffing, training,
technology, leadership, and organization. Of note, they have
hired civilian professionals for many of the mission support
functions, including the CFO, the CIO, the Chief Operating
Officer, and the strategic planning and technical development
functions. However, again, fully implementing changes and
resolving the underlying issues will take a multiyear
commitment and depend heavily on adequate funding and staffing.
And, unfortunately, some of the initiated or proposed
actions have not yet resulted in the desired outcomes. The
Secret Service has increased hiring but still struggles with
staff retention. For example, they hired 402 special agents
between October 2014 and June 2016 but lost 420 special agents
through attrition, for a net loss of approximately 18 special
agents. During the same period, they hired 342 Uniformed
Division officers but lost 312 through attrition, again,
gaining only 30 officers during that time period.
Although training has been enhanced, it continues to be
hindered by low staffing levels and high operational demands on
the workforce. The Secret Service continues to be challenged by
significant hiring delays. A lack of dedicated human resources
staff lengthens the hiring process. For example, special agents
in field offices conduct polygraph examinations and background
investigations as collateral duties, but their primary duties
of investigation and protection, of course, take precedence.
Additionally, low staffing levels of human resources personnel
has slowed the process. At the end of 2015, for example, almost
a third of human resource positions went vacant in the Secret
Service.
Finally, we took a closer look at the state of the Secret
Service's IT program in light of the episode in which agents
improperly accessed and distributed Chairman Chaffetz's
personal information contained on the Secret Service mainframe
known as MCI. We found that the data that was contained within
the mainframe was migrated to five different data systems.
Unfortunately, in a report that we released several weeks ago,
none of those systems have adequate protections in place to
prevent similar breaches from happening.
We found major IT systems running without an authority to
operate, which is a certification approved by the DHS CIO that
effective controls are in place to protect the information on
the systems. Additionally, we found inadequate, incomplete, or
missing system security plans, inadequate controls on who has
access to the systems, and poor audit controls, which hinders
the Secret Service's ability to detect unusual user activities
and provide the appropriate response to potential or actual
security risks.
Moreover, we found that each of these systems had poor
privacy protections and inadequate record retention practices.
In fact, we found employment applications that were more than 5
years old, including records up to 14 years old. We found
Chairman Chaffetz's 2003 application for employment, for
example, and the corresponding personal information still
remaining within two of Secret Service's systems and,
therefore, susceptible to unauthorized access.
After we brought this to the Secret Service's attention,
they deleted that record in January 2016. However, the Secret
Service could not provide assurance that other applicants'
records and corresponding personal information had been
properly expunged from their systems.
We determined that the cause of these issues was that IT
management had not been a priority historically. We found that
the responsibility for the IT function had been unwisely split
into two parts and that the CIO at the time did not have
sufficient authority over the data systems and the Secret
Service suffered from significant turnover and staff vacancies.
We believe that the Secret Service is moving to correct these
deficiencies and will, of course, monitor that progress.
This concludes my testimony. I will be happy to answer
questions that the committee may have.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Roth follows:]
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Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you, Mr. Roth.
We'll now recognize Mr. O'Carroll for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. PATRICK P. O'CARROLL, JR.
Mr. O'Carroll. Good morning, Chairman Chaffetz, Ranking
Member Cummings, and members of the committee.
As the chairman noted in his opening, one of our Secret
Service members told us that he participated in every campaign
rotation this year. In May, he approached the pay cap. At
yearend, he will have exceeded the pay cap by around $30,000.
He has missed holidays, birthdays, and other life events. He
has been away from home for almost 8 months, and while off
campaign rotations, he is often away participating on
Presidential and Vice Presidential protective assignments.
Another member told us that he worked more overtime hours
in April and September than regular work hours.
Lastly, an agent told us that if the candidate wins, he
will approach being $40,000 over the cap. His average workweek
is 90 hours. He is away from his family for weeks at a time and
misses out on various functions of his school-age children. His
wife feels as though she is a single mother. And there is no
financial benefit to his being away. The burden is actually
greater since they have to spend more money on childcare since
he can't help out.
On behalf of the membership of the Federal Law Enforcement
Officers Association, thank you for the opportunity to appear
here before you today. FLEOA is the largest nonpartisan,
nonprofit professional association, exclusively representing
more than 26,000 active and retired Federal law enforcement
officers across 65 different agencies.
I would like to discuss in my testimony today the challenge
faced by U.S. Secret Service special agents who have worked
hundreds of hours of uncompensated overtime during the course
of the 2016 campaign season. This is an issue with which I am
very familiar, having served as a special agent on Presidential
candidate details as well as permanent assignments on both the
President and Vice Presidential protective divisions over my
24-year career in Secret Service.
The 2016 Presidential campaign has proven to be one which
by most measures was unprecedented. Over the course of the past
year, many Secret Service agents have participated in
approximately 7,000 protective stops, spent over 200 nights on
the road, worked 16 or more hours per day, and likely did not
spend more than 1 night in the same bed. Without them, however,
the sacred process we go through every 4 years may not happen
safely.
During this 1 year, exceptional sacrifices of family,
friends, and life are required of special agents, who are
forced to work inordinate amounts of overtime under an
operational tempo that is not unlike a military deployment.
Yet, despite the unusual demands placed upon agents this
campaign season, many of them will not receive full
compensation for the long hours that they have worked. It is
not free money or a bonus, but money earned logging 16-hour
days for weeks on end with back-to-back rotations between
campaign travel and investigative details.
They have lost and will continue to lose a significant
amount of overtime compensation this year because their pay
cannot exceed the pay for a GS-15, step 10. The current
situation has become not just a recruitment and retention issue
but a fundamental matter of fairness to those who willingly
place themselves in harm's way for long hours spent carrying
out their sworn duty to protect and serve.
Fortunately, a solution that will ensure compensation for
these and other Secret Service agents affected by the pay cap
this year is in sight. Thanks to the efforts of this committee
and your colleagues on the Homeland Security and Government
Affairs Committee and both the House and Senate Appropriations
Committees, Congress is close to finalizing language that will
provide the USSS with a temporary waiver of the pay cap.
Language like this has been included in both the House and
Senate versions of Fiscal Year 2017 Homeland Security
Appropriations Act to waive the pay cap up to level 3 of the
Executive Schedule for either 2016 or for both 2016 and 2020.
It is also proposed to fund at level 2, and FLEOA fully
supports the ES-2 level since this will certainly provide some
measure of relief for the affected agents.
So, while FLEOA greatly appreciate your efforts, Mr.
Chairman and Mr. Cummings, we would also like to stress the
importance of working together to find a permanent solution to
this pay cap issue. Such a solution could include granting the
Director of the Secret Service the authority to waive the
application of the pay cap as necessary during a calendar year
to meet the demands of the agency's protective functions.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you and
Ranking Member Cummings again for working with us to address
this important issue. As a Nation, we expect a lot from the
small group of patriotic men and women of the USSS, who
voluntarily choose to stand between anarchy and order to ensure
the leaders of our Republic are able to perform their jobs free
from threats or the fear of assault.
At its core, it is a fundamental matter of fairness to
ensure that these individuals are fully compensated for the
duties they perform on a daily basis, and we greatly appreciate
your efforts to do just that.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear today, and I
would be happy to answer any questions.
[Prepared statement of Mr. O'Carroll follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
We'll now recognize the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr.
Duncan, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Duncan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Dougherty, your agency reported a total staff of 6,507
at the end of fiscal year 2016. That was up from 6,289 at the
beginning of the fiscal year, so there's actually been an
increase in employment over the past fiscal year.
But I am told that the Service also uses contract
employees, but the staff doesn't seem to know exactly how many
contract employees you have. So can you give me some rough idea
about how much work is being done with contract employees? And
has that number also gone up in this past fiscal year?
Mr. Dougherty. Thank you, Mr. Duncan, for that question.
So I can go right to the heart of it, and that is that
we're doing everything we can in which to up the tempo for
hiring. And, in particular, we have, in fact, added substantial
numbers of contractors, both on the Talent Acquisition Division
group, which basically hires people at the beginning of the
process--that's roughly about 24 individuals, if I recall
correctly the number. And that's basically on a two-time basis,
sort of in terms of sort of the schedules.
And, in addition, on the security side, we've actually
added substantially another 20-plus contractors to sort of
upgrade the tempo. That reflects several man-hours of effort
for contractor support in which to sort of up the tempo on
that.
I might add to that then that, you know, in fiscal year
2016, we literally hired 327 special agents, 309 Uniformed
Division officers, and 194 professional people, so 830
individuals in 1 year. If we continue to go forward on the pace
that we're doing, we will hire 1,666 individuals over the next
2 fiscal years, this fiscal year and next. We are, in fact,
ramping up and really trying to increase the pace.
Mr. Duncan. Sixteen hundred over and above the 6,500-plus
that you have now?
Mr. Dougherty. That adds to the ultimate bottom-line
numbers. Of course, you always have to factor attrition into
that, and that is always an issue for us. But, ultimately, we
are attempting to try to really increase the pace.
Mr. Duncan. All right.
Let me ask you this. The committee issued this report
that's already been mentioned at the end of last year, and it
says, ``The Secret Service has failed to make clear that
protection is its ultimate priority.'' And I understand that,
ordinarily, about a third of the time is being spent on
protection-related activities, but that ramped up to 44 percent
during the election.
But we've seen many hateful, very hateful, demonstrations
against President-elect Trump just in the last few days,
several places around the country. Are you going to ramp up
your protection? Are you going to give President-elect Trump
more protection than you would ordinarily do? What's your
thoughts on that?
Mr. Dougherty. Well, first, of course, protection is the
priority mission of the United States Secret Service. And if
there's any doubt about it, Director Clancy has said that--I
apologize--that protection is the priority mission of the
Secret Service. Director Clancy has said that.
With respect to both the inaugural and all the other
things, procedures or methods related to protecting the new
administration, obviously, we will continue to use the model
that's been very successful in going forward to providing
protection to the President. And I think the same thing sort of
applies to this President-elect as it does for the previous
President.
Mr. Duncan. The committee has a report that says the IT
systems at the Secret Service are described as the worst at DHS
and that, quote, ``managers cannot even explain basic IT
principles'' and that Department officials have said that
there's a culture of mishandling of secure information. Of
course, we have that report of the contract advance person at
the White House whose Gmail account was hacked with all sorts
of secure information.
What's the latest on that? Do you still believe that that's
accurate, that the IT systems at the Secret Service are the
worst in the whole Department?
Mr. Dougherty. So let me just answer that first for my
colleague, in the sense of let me introduce Kevin Nally.
Mr. Duncan. All right.
Mr. Dougherty. One of the principal structurally important,
profound things that we did in the Secret Service--and I think
this is an important decision made by Director Clancy--is to
bring in a professional who was not an agent to effectively run
our IT systems in the Secret Service.
Mr. Nally could actually clearly address the issues
regarding the technology part of this.
General Nally. Thank you, sir. I'll break it up in a couple
parts.
First, one, is it a cultural issue? No, it's not a cultural
issue. The individuals that did get out of place, do wrong
things, is roughly .7 percent of the population at Secret
Service. It's not a cultural thing. We now have procedures in
place to check for that. People understand the ramifications of
their actions in that regard, and, plus, we have training and
education on PII and sensitive types of information.
Number two is, in the OIG report dated October 7, 2016,
released October 14, 2016, seven of those recommendations are
mine. Six of those have been closed--six of them. Six of them
were closed prior to the report being released. The one that's
going to be continued ongoing is a continual type of education
and training for my information systems security officers,
cybersecurity professionals, and those that have access to the
network, in terms of cybersecurity awareness, phishing-type
drills, et cetera, et cetera.
When I arrived here on November 16, 2015, I saw a need for
a complete reorganization of the Information Resources
Management Division that was under another assistant director
to the office of the CIO. And I want to stress, too, that this
is how Mr. Clancy sees IT. He knows it's very, very important
to the Secret Service mission, and I have and had his full
support in this.
I now have a complete accounting of all IT spending in the
Secret Service. I'm the only CIO in the Secret Service, and I'm
the only designated approving authority for those systems that
we operate in the Secret Service. And all this has been
rectified. And, again, I'm the only CIO, I'm the only DAA, and
I have direct oversight on all IT spending.
Additionally, in the OIG report dated October 7, 2016,
three of the four systems in that report now have ATOs. The
fourth one is human capital, which I gave a target date of
December 31, 2016, and we're on track to meet that.
Thank you.
Mr. Duncan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
We'll now recognize the gentlewoman from the District of
Columbia, Ms. Norton.
Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I appreciate that
you have held this hearing. It comes at a timely moment.
I want to say to our witnesses how much we appreciate your
service to our country. You've come before us when we've had a
number of complaints. I don't think that is what this hearing
is about today.
And I must say, I do not envy you with your mission in the
coming months. I have never seen Americans reply or respond to
an election by going in huge numbers to the streets simply to
protest the new President even before he has done anything.
This is a President and others who have to be protected by you.
So the notion of a honeymoon is out of the window. Then you
have the upcoming inauguration. And here in the District, we
are awaiting that. And, of course, there are people who promise
to come in huge numbers for that event.
There was concern about your mission when we had our first
African-American President. Some have expressed even greater
concern today, given the division in the country.
I am very pleased that this committee issued a bipartisan
report that used very strong language, particularly strong
language when it comes to staffing, but it was bipartisan
language, in December of last year, where the committee, this
committee found--and here I am quoting--``a staffing crisis
that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency.'' Now,
that, of course, was before all of what I have just described.
We found, this committee found, that the Secret Service had
fewer employees than at any time over the past decade, and we
found an 8-percent decline in special agents over a 5-year
period.
Then, in August, this committee sent a letter to you, to
the Secret Service, requesting quarterly staffing updates, and
last week you responded. Mr. Dougherty, if I understand your
response, there was a net increase of 84 special agents during
fiscal year 2016. That's about a 3-percent increase. Is that
correct?
Mr. Dougherty. Yes, ma'am. Generally, that's the number,
roughly.
Ms. Norton. Now, that certainly is important to note. The
number is still significantly below the number of special
agents before the so-called sequester. Isn't that correct?
Mr. Dougherty. The series of events that occurred for the
Service from 2011 on really contributed significantly to the
Service effectively sort of bleeding off individuals.
Ms. Norton. ``Series of events,'' by which you mean what?
Mr. Dougherty. That we had a funding deficit already going
into 2012----
Ms. Norton. Yes. Then the sequester and other----
Mr. Dougherty. And it was exacerbated by a variety of other
events. It was----
Ms. Norton. But here's my concern.
Mr. Dougherty. --a perfect storm.
Ms. Norton. It looks like you did, in fact, hire a number
of agents--the figure I have is 281 special agents--in 2016,
and yet there was only a net increase of 84. What happened to
the nearly 200 agents? I'm concerned with you're hiring them,
you're not keeping them. Or somebody is leaving. Who is leaving
and why?
Mr. Dougherty. So we're hiring at historic rates, and we
also have an attrition issue which we're attempting to try to
address as well. And so----
Ms. Norton. You ascribe that attrition issue to what? And
are they older agents, people ready to retire? Are they the new
agents who are coming in who are not retained? Who are they?
Mr. Dougherty. It's a series of issues, Congresswoman
Norton. You go through waves where you hire at certain times at
high levels, and those people will effectively leave at
generally the same time. But we also, too, just simply have a
really tough, tough mission. And, ultimately, we're----
Ms. Norton. Is it what Mr. O'Carroll spoke of, the working
conditions that have developed? There are too few agents; some
agents are doing two or three jobs rather than one job?
Mr. Dougherty. Absolutely. That's one of the many issues
that we are addressing, yes, ma'am.
Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentlewoman.
I now recognize the gentleman from South Carolina, Mr.
Gowdy, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Gowdy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. O'Carroll, I don't know if this is a memo or if this
was a press release from FLEOA. I'm going to read part of it,
and then that will give us some context to have a conversation:
``Unfortunately, we have seen some in Congress act as if they
were part of the media.''
I want to just stop right there and say, of all the
criticisms that Members of Congress have gotten in the 6 years
I've been here, that one hurts the most.
``Instead of introducing bills that could help our agency,
they'd rather go for the 30-second sound bite that tarnishes
the reputation of the agency and work ethic of its personnel.
This is unfortunate, as we do have many allies in Congress that
appreciate the work of the Secret Service, its personnel, and
want to help, but they are overshadowed by the screaming
minority who might not even be able to pass the test for our
job.''
Now, I consider myself to be one of your allies, so I don't
think you have a better friend in Congress than the former
prosecutors. But I am wondering what Members of Congress you
were referring to that would rather pursue a 30-second sound
bite than help the agency.
Mr. O'Carroll. Well, Representative Gowdy, I guess, first
and foremost, that isn't my quote. It is a quote of a
representative from the Secret Service who is a member of my
association and it came out on our letterhead, so yes. Our
concern on this thing is--and we've been dealing with your
committee, in fact, with you, with the chairman, and expressing
our concerns that this is a budget issue that needs to be
coming from the authorizers to the appropriators and asking the
appropriators to, you know, to add the money that will help
with the pay cap on this thing.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, and see there, you just made your case
without talking about any Member of Congress who is more
interested in a 30-second sound bite than they are helping the
agency, you just did it, which makes me wonder why this memo
didn't do it.
Are there Members in particular? I actually don't think
I've ever been on television talking about the Secret Service,
so I don't think you're talking about me. Who are you talking
about?
Mr. O'Carroll. In this case, as I said, Mr. Gowdy, I didn't
write that one, so I'm not too sure specifically which Member
was being talked about.
Mr. Gowdy. But it came out on FLEOA letterhead.
Mr. O'Carroll. Yes, sir.
Mr. Gowdy. Right?
Mr. O'Carroll. Yep.
Mr. Gowdy. And I'm assuming you don't let people send
things out on your letterhead that don't at least have some
imprimatur of your support.
Mr. O'Carroll. Well, Mr. Gowdy, what I can do on that one
is I can go back to the author of it and find out which Member
he was speaking about specifically. But I got to tell you, this
is a can that's been kicked down the road for years and years
in terms of this overtime issue.
Mr. Gowdy. Right. I get that.
Mr. O'Carroll. And there's a lot to blame.
Mr. Gowdy. But because I am an ally, sometimes allies also
need to offer some words of correction. That paragraph ended by
saying, ``overshadowed by the screaming minority who might not
even be able to pass the test for our job.''
Can you see how that might have gotten my attention, the
way that that would be phrased, ``might not be able to pass the
test for our job''?
Mr. O'Carroll. Yes, sir.
Mr. Gowdy. That's a curious line to put in a memo, isn't
it?
Mr. O'Carroll. Yes, sir.
Mr. Gowdy. Except it's not curious. You and I know exactly
what that author was talking about, don't we?
Mr. O'Carroll. I could guess at it, yes.
Mr. Gowdy. Guess.
Mr. O'Carroll. Would be some members of this committee.
Mr. Gowdy. Such as whom?
Mr. O'Carroll. I have no idea.
Mr. Gowdy. How about the one whose personnel file was
accessed? Could it be that one?
Mr. O'Carroll. I would say that there hasn't been very good
treatment of that application over the years, which is one of
the reasons why we're here, and maybe that was a subliminal
reference to it. I don't know. I didn't write it.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, it's actually not subliminal. It could not
be more clearer. There's nothing subliminal about it. It just
flat out says, who could not pass our test for our job.
Mr. O'Carroll. And it was a general statement on it, not
specific, sir.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, Mr. O'Carroll, you can't run a license tag
because you happen to think the driver is cute, you can't run
an NCIC background check because your kids might be hanging out
with some bad characters, and you can't access the personnel
files of Members of Congress that you happen to not like at
that particular point. You would agree with me there, wouldn't
you?
Mr. O'Carroll. Reprehensible, and I agree with you.
Mr. Gowdy. All right. Well, it's reprehensible.
Mr. Inspector General, what happened to him.
Mr. Roth. My understanding is that there was discipline
that was imposed by the department. I don't have those details
because I was not involved in the discipline process.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, when you say discipline, give me the range
of discipline that could be possible.
Mr. Roth. Well, I think the range of discipline could be
anywhere from termination----
Mr. Gowdy. Was anybody terminated?
Mr. Roth. My understanding is no.
Mr. Gowdy. Was anybody given time off?
Mr. Roth. My understanding was, yes, people were given----
Mr. Gowdy. With or without pay?
Mr. Roth. Given time off without pay that was not
suspended. There was a number of individuals who were, received
time off, and that was suspended, but there were others who
actually did get time off.
Mr. Gowdy. How pervasive was the breach?
Mr. Roth. Well, our report said that it was approximately
40-some people, only of which 3 had--or 4, I can't remember off
the top of my head----
Mr. Gowdy. Is there any ambiguity on whether or not it's a
good idea to access anyone's, Member of Congress or otherwise,
application or personnel file to use for retributive purposes?
Mr. Roth. No.
Mr. Gowdy. Is there any ambiguity about whether or not
that's a good idea.
Mr. Roth. It is not.
Mr. Gowdy. Can you let me know what discipline was meted
out? There's no one in Congress that holds law enforcement in
higher esteem than I do, no one. But we choose to go into that
line of work, and the rules apply even to us. And I think
doing--accessing programs that the public does not have access
to, to try to embarrass your critics, to use Mr. O'Carroll's
word, is reprehensible. So I'd like to know what punishment was
meted out.
Mr. Roth. Very well. Thank you.
Mr. Gowdy. With that, I would yield back.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll now recognize the ranking member, Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. I want to really kind of get down to the
bottom of this. And I think Ms. Norton was headed in the right
direction. If we are hiring agents and they are leaving almost
as fast as we're hiring them, gentlemen, we need to figure out
why we're losing so many so quickly and whether that has
anything to do, Mr. Roth, with the infrastructure inside the
Secret Service.
But before I get to that, I want to ask you, Mr. Dougherty,
what are you all telling the agents about their salaries, and
how do you keep their morale? What do you say to them? Did you
say that you were coming up here with the urgency of now to try
to help them get adequate pay? I'm just curious.
Mr. Dougherty. I think that's one of the things, Mr.
Cummings, that we're attempting to try to do differently and
better, is simply communicate to populations in a different
way. Director Clancy sends out videos to the population all the
time about what we're trying to do to change the overall
culture and the overall----
Mr. Cummings. Did you say to them that you're trying?
Because I got to tell you, going back to some of the things Mr.
Gowdy said, you've got a lot of allies up here. So we're trying
to figure out--so do you tell them you're going to go and try
to fight to make sure they get their overtime?
Mr. Dougherty. I think they're seeing that, I think they're
sensing that, I think that we are telling them that, that
there's a committed leadership on the part of the Secret
Service to try and sort of change many of these different
things. Pay is a big part of it, obviously. There's a lot of
other things, too, that go to sort of quality of life. We did a
work/life assessment with that third party as well to basically
sort of open up ourselves to try and get an idea as to how to
be able to approach those things.
So structurally there's so many changes taking place in the
Secret Service right now, I feel confident and enthusiastic
about a lot of the things that are going on. I'm also
enthusiastic about the fact that we're talking about proposed
legislation, which I think does in fact address a very
important issue that's been a chronic one and a recurring one
for the Secret Service over the years.
Mr. Cummings. Well, Mr. Roth, you've got to help me on this
one. I swear, I don't want to be going in circles on this. And,
you know, I looked at some of the things that you've said, and
you said it several times in your testimony, you talk about
requiring a multiyear commitment and depend heavily on adequate
funding and staffing. There's two parts to that.
So can you tell us what we need to do, first of all, to
help the Secret Service not have this bucket that as fast as we
pour agents in, we lose them out. I mean, I think that's what
we've got to get--that's the bottom line. And I think that's
where the chairman is. We're trying to figure out how do we be
more most effective and efficient.
So can you help us? I mean, tell us what they are doing
wrong. Tell us if they should be moving faster. This long-term
commitment, what does that mean? You know, we need to know
because I think that would help guide us as to what we do.
Mr. Roth. I mean, these are systemic problems that have
accumulated over years. So, for example, with the hiring
situation, for example, you have Secret Service agents who do
protection and do investigations, but also, as a collateral
duty, they have to do the background investigations of
applicants that are coming in. They have to do the polygraph
investigations of the folks that are coming in. That is a
hugely inefficient process. It creates a bottleneck for the
Secret Service.
So the time to hire numbers for the Secret Service are
very, very long. For a special agent, it's often in excess of a
year.
To be able to sort of modernize their systems, their
personnel systems, having a third of their HR personnel slots
vacant, in other words, they simply don't have the personnel to
be able to hire at the kind of tempo that----
Mr. Cummings. Stop right there.
Mr. Roth. Sure.
Mr. Cummings. Why is that? Because that's very significant,
if you don't have the hiring component and you've got missing
people there, vacancies there. So what's stopping them from
having those people? Is this a thing of musical chairs with
regard to the budget, or what? I mean, what's----
Mr. Roth. I think it's a chicken-and-egg problem, because
they don't have enough personnel to sort of ramp up the kinds
of efforts that they need to get more personnel. There are
things that they are doing, for example, with their IT system
for how it is that they process applications. They're having to
modernize that.
As the chairman talked about before, right now they have a
fairly antiquated system where people email PDF copies of their
background investigation form, which then gets printed out,
physically reviewed, and then reentered in. There's just
enormous inefficiencies in the system that have grown up over
time.
So I think what the Secret Service is attempting to do is
professionalize what it is that they do. But, for example,
changing an IT system within the government takes years, and
there's no really getting around that. By the time you get your
requirements together, by the time you do the acquisition, by
the time you develop the process that you need, it will be
years from now before they will have an effective IT system.
Mr. Cummings. The problem is that in the meantime, as Ms.
Norton said so eloquently, we have a President-elect who we
want to--I mean, he's coming under a lot of--I know that's
going to put a lot of pressure on the Secret Service because
you see what's happening in the streets. We want to make sure
that he is properly protected.
So all the time that you're talking about it's going to
take, how do we speed that process up and not subject him and
his family and others to less than adequate protection, and at
the same time, and at the same time properly compensate the men
and women of the Secret Service so that we don't have a further
erosion of morale?
I mean, I think those are the questions that are the bottom
line and should be the bottom line for this entire hearing.
And then I'm almost finished, Mr. Chairman.
So Mr. Nally--Mr. Roth, keep your mic on, keep your mic
on--Mr. Nally, you've heard what Mr. Roth said and Mr.
Dougherty. How do we do that? Again, we're losing people. He
just said that we've got some things that we need to fix.
Talk about the HR department. We want to know what you're
going to do to make the elite--help to make the elite the elite
and be able to staff up. Because we can pass all the money
that's out here, but if we don't have the mechanisms to hire
people and morale is being damaged, you know, that's a problem.
So help me. Talk to me.
Mr. Dougherty. Ranking Member, if I can add to that. I
think that we have in fact put most of the mechanisms,
refreshed modernized mechanisms. Let me sort of go through a
couple of them.
First of all, we changed our hiring system completely from
2013 through 2014 and 2015 now. It's a completely different
hiring system right now.
We have ELAC, basically, where we go and have people come
to a single place. We have now committed to--the Director is
committed to hiring a new professional civilian chief human
capital officer. We completely restructured our entire hiring
process and also our human capital structure and effectively
now have a national recruitment strategy.
Now, so I'd say that the numbers that I gave you, over the
next 2 years, we will have hired a third of our entire agency
over again. It's not about the numbers. We are doing everything
we can to bring in people.
Now, the campaign will subside. We will get back to sort of
a cadence where I think people start to kind of settle. And I
think that that retention levels that we're experiencing right
now, which are historic, are going to sort of calm down.
We do believe that we're going to get to a place where next
year we're going to be at 6,805 individuals and that the next
year, finally, additional individuals. We are moving towards
that. And remember, 6,805 is substantially over where we've
been, and it's moving rapidly towards the direction of 7,025,
where we were in 2012.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Roth, will you--I just want to--my time
has expired. But I've been wondering, can you comment on what
he just said?
Mr. Roth. Well, I certainly think that the building blocks
are in place, that they have professionalized their staff. For
example, a CFO who is a professional CFO, a CIO, a chief
operating officer, now a chief human capital officer, all those
were recommendations of the PMP that they thought were
necessary to get the basic building blocks of, you know,
management fundamentals down as opposed to having agents come
through on 3-year rotations to try to, you know, be the CIO.
But time is going to tell whether or not this is
sufficient. Right now they are caught, I think, in a vicious
cycle; that is, with the increased tempo means that there's
going to be increased attrition, and then increased attrition
means that the work tempo for everybody else who's left
increases.
So perhaps Mr. Dougherty is right that they will be able to
break that cycle at the conclusion of this election events, and
we will simply monitor it and see.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
I'll now recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr.
Meadows, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Meadows. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank each of you for your testimony. And I want to start
off by saying that I've enjoyed a good relationship with
Director Clancy and his leadership. I wear a law enforcement
pin almost every day that I am here or in the district. It is
my heart and my passion.
I'm frustrated a little bit because of what I hear today.
Mr. Dougherty, just to be frank, you refer to your agents as a
population. They're not a population. They're people. They're
families. And I've had the pleasure of being able to work
alongside them in North Carolina where we got to see a lot of
the people that have been away from their families for a very
long time, not just with the Secret Service but with the
Department of Homeland Security as well.
And so when we look at the strains, I'm all about making
sure that they get compensated properly and that we don't have
this systemic problem. But here's my concern, Mr. Dougherty. I
continue to hear from agents who say that the systemic problem
within the Service is not about the systems, it's not about the
computer systems, it's about the 8th floor, it's about the
management and the fact that what we do is we continue to force
people to relocate in the middle of their term at 14 or 15
years with the Service, we continue to upend them.
And when are we going to fix that problem? Because you talk
about bad morale, you move somebody from California to
Washington, D.C., because it's the way that you do business. It
is time, and your counselor there behind you knows that this is
not our first rodeo together. It is critical that we handle
this problem because you're going to continue to have retention
problems until you fix the overall feeling within the Service
that the people just a few blocks from here care about them and
their families. So what's your plan for that?
Mr. Dougherty. Well, first of all, thank you, Congressman
Meadows for the comment about law enforcement. I do very much
appreciate that. And I didn't mean to convey necessarily
population versus people. Ultimately, they're individuals,
they're people, and we need to care about each and every one of
them and take care of each of them and to effectively trust
them and feel pride in them.
I think this is the one area that I think that if we're
really doing well, I think it's this area. We have onloaded
ourselves, in terms of starting, really asking for people
outside the agency to come in and focus group our people and
ask them the very issues that you're raising. How do you feel
about special agents?
Mr. Meadows. So what have you changed? I've only got 5
minutes. So based on that input, what have you changed? Because
I haven't seen a whole lot of change.
And getting back to what General Nally said, I believe that
the vast majority, if not almost all of our agents, there's not
a cultural aspect of poor performance. But I do believe that
there is a cultural problem with regards to the way that the
Service looks at who gets hired, when they get hired. Even the
new agents who would gladly come to Washington, D.C., you send
them somewhere else and then you bring them back midstream as
if that's some kind of wonderful way to do the project.
Have you addressed that? Yes or no?
Mr. Dougherty. Yes, sir, I believe we have. Let me just
raise just a couple of points here.
Mr. Meadows. So when I start getting phone calls, and they
call me directly, when I start getting phone calls, I'm not
going to have to come back and ask you to clarify your sworn
testimony today, you've addressed that?
Mr. Dougherty. They asked us to change the special agent
relocation committee. We did that. They asked us to change the
way that there's requests, basically, for exceptional
circumstances. We changed that. They asked us for a new special
agent promotion process. We changed that. They asked us for a
new special agent career progress----
Mr. Meadows. So why do you have the retention problem then?
Mr. Dougherty. I think basically there's----
Mr. Meadows. Because it isn't money, I can tell you. Money
is a motivator for 6 weeks. Now, getting them properly paid and
overtime, that is an issue. But the other issue that
systemically within the Service has nothing to do with the
amount of money, it has to do with the culture that is there.
And I've heard from too many agents to know that that's not the
case.
Mr. Dougherty. Well, I think compensation is a big part
because when you're crushing people and you're asking them to
go----
Mr. Meadows. Well, you've got people behind you that are
disagreeing with you right now. I watch people, and they're
disagreeing, they're shaking their head no. They would agree
with my statement that it has some to do with money but a whole
lot to do with the culture.
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not disagreeing with you. I think it has
something to do with money. I think it has to do with a lot
more than that. I think there's a lot of things that we are
attempting to try and move and change.
So all of the different things that came up in the Eagle
Hill, for example, work/life process, that basically we--that
they said--asked us to do, we are implementing. We're
effectively going forward and doing those things.
We just put our work/life study on our intranet site. It's
there for our people to see. What do they recommend? What are
we moving forward on? It's many things. It's multiple things.
So I do think that there is, in fact, progress made. We're
hoping that we see the effects of that progress.
Mr. Meadows. Well, this committee wants to hear from those
agents that are being affected for recommendations so that we
can follow up with you.
I appreciate the chair holding this hearing. I yield back.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll now recognize the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr.
Lynch, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the ranking member.
I want to thank the panelists, Mr. Dougherty, Mr. Nally,
Mr. Roth, Mr. O'Carroll. I appreciate the job you all are
doing.
I have a couple of slides here I just want you to take a
look at it, if you would. Could we put up the one regarding
total full-time employees at the Secret Service?
Well, let me just explain. I'll wait for the slide. While
we are waiting for them, let me just say, you know, we've been
looking at a couple of the incidents around the White House
that have occurred over the last couple of years, last few
years, you know, people breaching the perimeter, one fellow
running through the White House down into the Green Room. We've
had situations with armed personnel getting on the elevator
with the President. A bunch of embarrassing moments.
And I think that the pressure on our Secret Service
employees under this new threat environment, as Mr. Dougherty
has explained, is only getting worse with the number. Here we
are, okay.
[Slide]
Mr. Lynch. Total full-time employees, if you can look at
that, in 2006, we seem to be on a trend line of addressing this
new threat environment. We went from about 6,500 to about 7,000
employees over 5 years. But that peak, that peak of 7,024
employees, that's when we came in with the Budget Control Act
in 2011, and then you see a precipitous decline in full-time
personnel, down to about 6,300.
So we've got less now at Secret Service than we had back in
2006. And as you have explained in your testimony, the threat
environment is getting worse.
Can we put up the other one on special agents? Here's
special agents, okay.
[Slide]
Mr. Lynch. So we were trying to ramp up, because of the
extreme threat environment, we were trying to ramp up. Over
2006 to about 2011, we went from about 3,200, almost 3,300, to
about 3,500. And then again the Budget Control Act comes into
play, and now we've got less than we had in 2006, even though
the demands on our folks are worse, especially your special
agents.
Two of the areas where I think are very important, one is
processing our employees, our special agents and Secret Service
personnel, and also training them. Training them. I think, you
know, that's something that, Mr. Dougherty, you've talked about
in the past, and, Mr. Roth, you've highlighted that as well,
and Mr. O'Carroll, you've agreed as well.
We want a highly professional, capable, well-paid, and the
pay needs to be better. Not only shouldn't we be, you know,
putting a Band-Aid on it for 1 year, an election year, we've
got to look at the whole structure here. We've got to pay our
agents better. We're asking a lot of them, and we ought to try
to establish a pay level that will attract the best and
brightest, and also the academy type. The professionalism and
excellence that we demand from our Secret Service personnel, we
have to have commensurate training and pay for them.
Mr. Roth, is there any special change that we could make or
any area that Congress could focus on to help our Secret
Service personnel and help that agency, you know, get to where
we need them to be?
Mr. Roth. I think legislatively there's probably not a lot
that needs to be done, at least in the short term. I would
recommend continued oversight. I think that's a very important
and healthy thing that we're going to do, because as I said in
my testimony and as we say in our reports, they've made initial
good progress. The leader of the Secret Service has embraced
the Protective Mission Panel recommendations, has embraced this
committee's recommendations to move forward.
But we don't know what the future holds. So the only way to
be able to continue to hold the Secret Service's feet to the
fire is with continued oversight that this committee gives and
hopefully that our office gives as well.
Mr. Lynch. Okay. I believe my time has expired. I just want
to thank you all for your contribution to this hearing and to
the issues that we're working on here. Thank you again.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll now recognize the gentleman from South Carolina, Mr.
Mulvaney, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Mulvaney. I thank the chairman.
Mr. O'Carroll, I don't know if you've been here before or
not. I don't think you've been here since I've been on this
committee. But I think you'll learn, especially with myself and
my colleague from South Carolina, Mr. Gowdy, one of the things
we appreciate is candor. There's really no reason to beat
around the bush.
You all were talking about Jason, Chairman Chaffetz, we get
it, that's fine. Okay. You could sit and go back and forth all
day saying: Well, I don't know who it might be. I could guess,
but I won't guess.
I mean, you all put out another, a separate press release
that actually specifically mentioned the chairman. It said--and
I don't know who Jon Adler is, apparently he's your national
president--quote, ``The chairman's actions boggle the rational
mind. He's turning his committee into the fictional USS Caine
as he subpoenas Secret Service law enforcement officers to his
ship to count strawberries,'' end quote.
That's about the chairman. The previous statement is about
the chairman. Let's just be honest with each other. It's a much
better way to conduct a hearing.
So I'll ask you a straight question: Do you think it helps?
Mr. O'Carroll. No.
Mr. Mulvaney. So why do you do it?
Mr. O'Carroll. Well, I'll tell you one thing. I've been
doing this now for 3 months, Mr. Mulvaney, and in that 3
months, I've tried to tighten up our processes and procedures.
If you notice in both those cases--and one of, I guess, a
nuance on this thing, is it isn't from the Federal Law
Enforcement Officers Association, it's from their foundation
that those two press releases came. And that Mr. Adler had been
a president of FLEOA. He went over to the foundation, which is
the charitable arm of our organization.
Up until now, anybody who had an officer position had
access to our letterhead press release type information. That's
what you're referring to. But I've got to tell you----
Mr. Mulvaney. I hate to cut you off, but I mean, I mean,
seriously, man, the headline--it says the Federal Law
Enforcement Officers Association. Again, this is a minor deal,
but don't sit there and tell me it's your foundation, not the
association. I mean, it is----
Mr. O'Carroll. I'm trying to be as candid as I can.
Mr. Mulvaney. Is this your letterhead?
Mr. O'Carroll. It's the foundation letterhead, if I'm not
mistaken.
Mr. Mulvaney. No, you are mistaken. It says Federal Law
Enforcement Officers Association.
Mr. O'Carroll. Well, then maybe it was under his watch as
the president, which is outside of mine.
Mr. Mulvaney. Okay. Let's get to the thing. I mean,
seriously, you're killing me with this. Let's have an honest
conversation and not try and--ugh.
Inspector General Roth, here's, I think, the last question
I want to ask about the topic, which is the punishments. I
think one of the things that frustrates us, that frustrates
people back home, is that something deplorable to happen,
something awful happens, that the Secret Service of the United
States of the America used private records about a sitting
Member of Congress to try and make him look bad and undermine
his authority.
In fact, I think you said something disturbing, which is it
says that there's nothing to prevent that from happening again.
So you're telling me that today a Secret Service agent who
doesn't like Mr. Cummings can go and start looking through your
files for material on him. Is that a true statement?
Mr. Roth. It depends whether Mr. Cummings was either a
protectee or an applicant. So, obviously, the Secret Service
doesn't keep records on everyone.
Mr. Mulvaney. Okay.
Mr. Roth. But certainly other applicants who would be in,
for example, Chairman Chaffetz's situation, those records still
are there, they still don't have audit protection, it's unclear
as to who has access to those records, and there's certainly no
way to detect that.
Mr. Gowdy. Will the gentleman yield for one question?
Mr. Mulvaney. I will.
Mr. Gowdy. How did you all know he was an applicant? How
did the Secret Service know that Chairman Chaffetz was an
applicant?
Mr. Roth. According to our investigation, someone decided
to look it up in MCI. There was a single individual in a field
office who just decided to look it up, and from there, it sort
of spread throughout the Secret Service.
Mr. Gowdy. But the next point, if you're going to run
Chairman Chaffetz's name, you could run Ranking Member
Cummings' name, you could run anyone's name.
Mr. Roth. Correct. But you may not find a record within the
MCI system.
Mr. Gowdy. It was only because Chairman Chaffetz respected
the Secret Service enough to actually apply.
Mr. Roth. That's correct.
Mr. Gowdy. Okay.
Mr. Mulvaney. Staying on that, Mr. Roth, one of the things
that frustrates us is that the penalties--no one was fired. I
think everybody acknowledges that. We've got a report here that
says that Homeland Security actually reduced the amount of
discipline from an average of 8-1/2 days to 5.3 days, in part,
because DHS discovered that mishandling of the information was
a common practice.
Since when is that an excuse? I mean, you had an assistant
director who encouraged the release of this information, but
part of the justification for not penalizing that person was
that, oh, everybody did it. Really, is that the defense, Mr.
Dougherty, that this was so common that you all searched Mr.
Cummings' records and mine or Mr. Gowdy's, that since everybody
did it, it was--didn't deserve to be punishable?
Mr. Dougherty. So, Mr. Mulvaney, first of all, let me
correct the record.
Mr. Mulvaney. Okay. Please.
Mr. Dougherty. Secret Service individuals, employees,
cannot access those records now. They are limited. That's one
of the things that we did do change over the last----
Mr. Mulvaney. Do you disagree, Mr. Roth, or are you guys
just using different terms for different things?
Mr. Dougherty. We're talking about what is in existence now
versus what it was when they actually looked at us. But we
have, in fact, looked at this issue.
Mr. Mulvaney. Mr. Roth, yes, no, maybe?
Mr. Roth. That's certainly not our information at the time
we did the audit. When you looked at the five different data
systems, for example, Chairman Chaffetz's information was in
two different systems. It was in the personnel system and the--
--
Mr. Mulvaney. When was your audit, Mr. Roth?
Mr. Roth. I'm sorry?
Mr. Mulvaney. When was your audit?
Mr. Roth. I think our field work was done, completed at the
beginning of 2016. I don't have the exact date.
Mr. Mulvaney. You're saying you fixed it since then, Mr.
Dougherty?
General Nally. Can I? May I address that, sir?
Mr. Dougherty. That's correct. Let me refer to my colleague
here, Mr. Mulvaney.
Mr. Mulvaney. Sure. If it's been fixed, that's good news
and we can move on.
General Nally. It's been fixed.
Mr. Mulvaney. Okay. Mr. Roth, do you mind taking another
look at that again?
General Nally. I can expound upon that if you'd like.
Mr. Roth. Certainly as part of our audit process, what we
do is every 90 days we take a look at what progress they've
made and we'll report on that.
Mr. Mulvaney. Well, if that's one thing that comes from the
hearing, that at least this can't happen again, maybe that's
good news. I wish we could talk more about what your agents are
going through, all of them, because it sounds like something
that would universally frustrate all of us up here. We'd like
to help, but, unfortunately, we've got other stuff to deal with
as well.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll recognize the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Clay, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As we discuss what Congress can do to improve staffing at
the Secret Service, we should understand how Congress helped
create the crisis in the first place. Last year, the chairman,
myself, and all members of this committee approved a bipartisan
report that found the Secret Service was experiencing a
staffing crisis, and one of the three main causes was, quote,
``significant cuts imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011,''
otherwise known as sequestration.
Mr. Dougherty, you were at the Secret Service when
sequestration took effect. Do you recall seeing how that
impacted the agency?
Mr. Dougherty. Congressman Clay, thank you very much for
that question. It was a perfect storm for the Secret Service to
find ourselves in that, and it contributed significantly to the
rapid decline in our funding and our budgeting for personnel,
and, frankly, we're still digging our way out of that hole.
Mr. Clay. Wow. The Secret Service rapidly lost 500
employees between 2011 and 2013. During those 3 years, the
committee's report found, quote, ``Congress approved $165
million less than the combined amount requested by the
President for the USSS.''
Mr. Dougherty, do you recall how senior leadership reacted
to those budget cuts at the time and how they handled the
shortfall?
Mr. Dougherty. I don't recall the exact numbers, but I do
recall that the management response was effectively to sort of
to pick people and programs and sort of just balance it so that
protection was not impacted and people were not impacted, as
little as possible. It was really effectively a very hard
choice and one in which we tried to manage as much as we
possibly could.
We are also, though, I might add, sort of leaning forward,
managing out of it. We are attempting to sort of manage out of
it. And funding is, in fact, a very important commodity, a
component to this particular issue.
Mr. Clay. Given the cuts, can you think of a way the Secret
Service could have avoided significant decreases in staff?
Mr. Dougherty. Would you repeat that question?
Mr. Clay. Given the cuts that impacted your agency, can you
think of a way the Secret Service could have avoided
significant decreases in staff?
Mr. Dougherty. We were in a place where our base funding
for our agency was already low, we hit the wall, it was really
a place where it was very difficult to sort of manage out of
it. It really became a Hobson's choice, technology, people,
programs, the whole like. So it ultimately became a very
difficult thing for us to sort of get out.
That's why we think that we are sort of starting to kind of
move out of that and why we are hiring at such a rapid pace in
order to make up the difference.
Mr. Clay. So you are now trying to restore that staffing to
a respectable level.
Mr. Dougherty. Director Clancy has made that the priority
of the agency, is to refresh and to bring people back in so
that we can give our people our lives back.
Mr. Clay. You know, one of the 29 recommendations in the
committee's bipartisan report was, and I quote, ``Congress
should ensure that the USSS has sufficient funds to restore
staffing to required levels, and USSS should ensure that it has
systems in place to achieve these goals.'' Permanently fixing
the pay cap waiver issue should be the first step of many
towards fulfilling this recommendation.
Mr. Roth or Mr. O'Carroll, would you concur that Congress
should ensure sufficient funding for Secret Service staffing?
Mr. O'Carroll first.
Mr. O'Carroll. Yes, Mr. Clay, we agree completely.
Sufficient funding would take care of a lot of the morale
issues and the other issues that they're experiencing.
Mr. Clay. Mr. Roth.
Mr. Roth. Yes. Certainly our findings have shown that this
is going to require a sustained long-term commitment of both
personnel and funds.
Mr. Clay. And, Mr. Dougherty, has the Secret Service
evaluated what levels of funding would be sufficient to restore
staffing appropriately?
Mr. Dougherty. We have, Congressman Clay. Whether it's the
strategic human capital plan that we submitted to Capitol Hill
last June or the very sort of other additional budgets that
we've done or the discussions we've had with committee staff
with respect to our quarterly evaluations, we continue to raise
the issue about additional funding in order to pay for a
mission-based budgeting process.
Mr. Clay. And it's evident that Congress cannot slash the
budget of the Secret Service without expecting serious
consequences.
And, Mr. Chair, my time is up.
Chairman Chaffetz. Thank you.
I'll now recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Mr. Dougherty, what do you believe Congress does not have a
right to see?
Mr. Dougherty. I have full respect for the oversight and
the constitutional duties of the Congress with respect to that,
so I'm not sure exactly.
Chairman Chaffetz. Is there anything that you believe the
Congress should not be able to see?
Mr. Dougherty. I believe that when we're going through a
process of trying to figure out records, how we all can
accommodate each other's sort of interest in making sure that
Congress is able to do their oversight job fully, completely,
and unhindered, and at the same time recognize to some extent
some of the considerations, the interests that we have as an
agency, particularly since we owe our people some privacy.
Mr. Gowdy. Would the gentleman yield?
Chairman Chaffetz. The gentleman from South Carolina.
Mr. Gowdy. Would you agree Congress created the whole
inspector general apparatus? That's not constitutional in
nature, it's statutory, right?
Mr. Dougherty. I would agree that Congress not only
established the IG, they established the United States Secret
Service in 1865.
Mr. Gowdy. All right. Good point. We did both. So Congress,
if they wanted to, could do away with all the inspector
generals' next appropriations process if they wanted to. They
don't, but they could, right?
Mr. Dougherty. I understand.
Mr. Gowdy. So why would Congress have to wait until an
inspector general concludes an investigation before Congress
can get in line to gain access to information?
Mr. Dougherty. What information are we talking about
Representative Gowdy?
Mr. Gowdy. Any information. It is routine for people to sit
at that table and say: We cannot cooperation with an ongoing
congressional investigation because there's an ongoing
inspector general investigation. It is routine for that to come
from witnesses at that table.
Mr. Dougherty. The information under both the February 2015
letter and the June 2015 subpoena has been substantially
complied with but for one document production, and also the
ultimate issue on names.
Chairman Chaffetz. Why not complete production under the
subpoena as opposed to substantial? Why do you get to make that
determination?
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not making that determination. What I've
saying is basically----
Chairman Chaffetz. The Secret Service--has the Secret
Service fully complied with the duly issued subpoena from
Congress?
Mr. Dougherty. We continue to owe you materials. We have
been doing production.
Chairman Chaffetz. When are we going to get it?
Mr. Dougherty. Well, first of all, it's been the committee
that basically inserted additional document requests that they
prioritized over this.
Chairman Chaffetz. No, no, no, no. It was issued in June, I
believe.
Mr. Dougherty. It was issued February and June, yes.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay. So why have you not fully complied
with it?
Mr. Dougherty. It's tens of thousands of documents. We are
relatively one document production away.
Chairman Chaffetz. No, you are taking extra time and work.
I'll give you an example here. In this particular document,
just on page 4 alone, there's 21 redactions.
Mr. Dougherty. I don't know which document you're referring
to, Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. All right. We tried to do this--this is
the Bartlett file.
Why do we get redacted documents?
Mr. Dougherty. I have not seen that document, so I can't
refer to that document.
Chairman Chaffetz. Go ahead. I'll show you a copy of it.
Deliver it to him.
Mr. Dougherty. What I'm saying, Chairman, is----
Chairman Chaffetz. Why should I get any redacted documents?
To my original question, what is it that Congress should not be
able to see?
Mr. Dougherty. So even on Wednesday and Thursday of last
week, I was sitting down with committee staff to try and
resolve this issue.
Chairman Chaffetz. I don't--you don't want to go there, Mr.
Dougherty, you do not want to go there. I want the documents.
We have a duly issued subpoena, and I expect you to fulfill it
without redactions. If you think there's a justification for
redaction, tell me now.
Mr. Dougherty. So the anonymous document--the anonymized
document that we gave you, which lays out sort of all the
various sort of categories of information about these
particular files, and we gave that to you yesterday, we thought
that that would help you be able to sort of parse out and
target what particular files you particularly want to discuss
in more fully in an informed way.
Chairman Chaffetz. You are making decisions that you should
not make. When I issue a subpoena, you should fully comply with
it. It's not optional. You don't get to parse it out and hide
things.
When you have 79 percent of the Secret Service saying that
your senior-most leadership is not honest and trustworthy, we
have a problem and we're going to go peek under the hood. When
you have more than 10 percent of your level 15, GS-15 and above
who have problematic backgrounds in that they've had to go
through investigations of themselves since they've been agents,
you have a problem.
When you hand us a document with nearly 30 people and only
1 of them says it's unsubstantiated, we have a problem. When
you have Cartagena happen and there are eight incidents since
Cartagena, and then they continue to get promoted, at least I
think it's five of them continue to get promoted, we have a
problem. We get to do an investigation.
So to my original question, what is it you think Congress
has no right to see?
Mr. Dougherty. Chairman, we're trying to basically sort of
lean forward, and I'm looking at the list----
Chairman Chaffetz. My simple question is, are you or are
you not going to comply with the subpoena?
Mr. Dougherty. That is why we are having a discussion with
staff----
Chairman Chaffetz. I don't want to have a discussion
anymore. We've been talking about it for nearly a year. I want
the documents. Are you or are you not going to provide them?
Mr. Dougherty. And there was discussion on the table in
which to accommodate that. But the list that we gave you----
Chairman Chaffetz. You really want to have--you want to
talk about the discussion that you proposed?
Mr. Gowdy. Would the chairman yield for a moment?
Chairman Chaffetz. Yes.
Mr. Gowdy. Just humor me and give me an idea what those
discussions would be about. What privilege are you asserting
that would prevent you from making information available to the
entity that created your department, your agency?
Mr. Dougherty. So I'm not standing here in a position as an
attorney here because I've not served in that role at the
Secret Service in a very long time.
Mr. Gowdy. That's okay. You don't have to be an attorney to
know why you're not turning stuff over.
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not asserting a privilege, Mr. Gowdy.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, if it's not a privilege----
Mr. Dougherty. What I'm doing is having a practical
discussion about the information that is--that furthers and
advances the committee's oversight and effectively bringing us
to a positive place.
Mr. Gowdy. Right. But I want you to hear those words from
our standpoint. Let me tell you what I hear when I hear you say
that: We're going to decide what we think you need.
Mr. Dougherty. And that's not the case.
Mr. Gowdy. That's what you just said, that advances the
committee's work. We may get to decide what advances our work.
Would you give redacted documents if it were a grand jury
subpoena or a court subpoena? If that branch of government
sought documents, would you go through and redact them before
you gave them to a judge?
Mr. Dougherty. I think that's a good example, but I'll take
a different example, that is, in terms of normal discovery.
Oftentimes, courts will say we're----
Mr. Gowdy. Oh, please tell me you are not treating Congress
like a criminal defense attorney. I am begging you to please
tell me that's not what you're doing.
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not, Mr. Gowdy. What I'm saying is
basically the discussions that we had as late as last week I
thought were going towards a creative resolution to this
particular issue which ultimately was going to give the
committee the place where they wanted to be on this.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, what I hear the chairman saying----
Mr. Dougherty. And I think in time we would have been able
to get there.
Mr. Gowdy. What I hear the chairman saying is the place he
wants to be is exactly what he asked for. Hence, there really
is no more need for negotiation. Unless you have a legal
privilege or some constitutional precept you are standing on to
not allow the branch that created your agency to see documents,
then what is the discussion about?
Mr. Dougherty. The discussion is about ultimately what is
fair to individuals as well. Look, if you have a child come
home where basically they do a fender bender, you basically
sort of put them in a timeout or whatever, and then you
ultimately give them the keys back.
This is exactly the same situation. We have individuals who
have engaged in misconduct, but it doesn't mean necessarily
that's the end of their career. They basically continue togo
forward, just like we treat our children. That's basically what
we're talking about.
Mr. Gowdy. Well, don't you think the father of three would
be able to appreciate that analogy? Then why can't you give us
the documents and then make the analogy?
Chairman Chaffetz. Let me recognize the ranking member, Mr.
Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. I just want to make sure we don't keep--it
seems like we're going in a little circle here, and I want to
get us off from the circle. Who makes the decisions with regard
to the redactions?
We're all concerned about Congress being able to do its
job, and to do its job, we need information. But who makes--you
know, when you said you're not a lawyer, you know, I know a lot
of people have a lot of--against lawyers, but we do--we have
been provided with special skills and information that a lot of
people don't have. So you're not a lawyer. Is that right?
Mr. Dougherty. I'm a lawyer.
Mr. Cummings. You are?
Mr. Dougherty. I am, yes.
Mr. Cummings. Okay. And so tell me who makes these
decisions with regard to redactions?
Mr. Dougherty. It's a combination of decision with----
Mr. Cummings. Do you make them?
Mr. Dougherty. I do not, and that's not the role that I
have played in, sir. I actually came here to talk about PMP and
the HOGR Committee report and not this, because this is an area
that I've not been involved in up till now. I don't play an
official role in this. I played an official role in building up
the new integrity system and the new table of penalties, but
not the old disciplinary system that we had before.
Mr. Cummings. So who can we talk to, to get the--you don't
sound like you're the right person to be asking these
questions. Who should we talk to, to get the answers to the
questions?
Mr. Dougherty. This is a joint decision of the Department.
Mr. Cummings. This is legal counsel for the Secret Service
and legal counsel for DHS?
Mr. Dougherty. Legal plays a very large role in the
decisionmaking, yes, sir.
Mr. Cummings. All right.
Chairman Chaffetz. I've got to conclude here with this line
of questioning here to tell you how highly offended--offensive
it is, you comparing this to a fender bender, okay. When you
have 79 percent of your employees saying that they don't
believe the senior management is acting honestly, don't tell me
it's some fender bender. This so-called employee number 5, an
SES-level employee transmitted hardcore pornography materials
along with racially charged and sexist conduct, and yet he only
received a written reprimand.
You have another. Here's an email I'm going to read to you,
as best I can, and sorry for the nature of this. This is,
``Subject: A very talented woman.'' And remember, this is on
government computers between employees.
``Now this''--uses the ``B'' word--``has some talent.
Careful where you open, there's definitely adult material.''
And then it goes on. But you redacted all this. I can't tell if
you're actually taking the appropriate disciplinary process.
And don't tell me this is some innocent fender bender where
we didn't take away the keys the right way. Get serious, Mr.
Dougherty, this is serious stuff. And if we can't trust the
senior-most people in the Secret Service, you're right, they're
going to have to lose their keys to the kingdom.
And I don't think you're taking the appropriate
disciplinary action, but I want to find out. I want to know. I
want to look at those files. And guess what, that's the way the
Congress is set up.
And when you have more than 10 percent of your SES
employees 15 and above that fall into this category, you have a
very serious problem. I could go on and on about the serious
nature. And when you send me a spreadsheet with 30 and none of
them are--only one of them says it's unsubstantiated, we have
the right and the duty and the obligation to look at it. That's
what oversight is all about. This committee was formed in 1814.
Abraham Lincoln served on this committee, for goodness sake.
So unless you have some legal authority, you are putting us
in a position that nobody wants to be in. We don't want to have
to hold you in contempt. You should cooperate.
And of all the things out there, Homeland Security, Secret
Service should know. You wouldn't put up with this. If you were
investigating somebody else and you had a subpoena and you
served it on them and they said, ``Give me a moment, I've got
to cross out a few things because I just want to make it fair,
I just want to cross these things out so that, you know, I want
to make sure that you get what you need,'' are you kidding me?
That is not the way this process works.
You have a duly issued subpoena. I expect you to comply
with it. When will you give me an answer as to whether or not
you're going to comply with the subpoena in its totality, not
in negotiation, in its totality? When will I have that answer?
Mr. Dougherty. Chairman Chaffetz, I'm not in a position to
tell you that.
Chairman Chaffetz. You knew this question was coming. We
told you in advance it's coming. When is it reasonable for me
to have answer to this question?
Mr. Dougherty. I think we are working very hard on that, at
the latter part of last week, and hopefully we can get to a
place----
Chairman Chaffetz. Give me a date.
Mr. Dougherty. I cannot give you a date, Chairman Chaffetz.
I'm not the decisionmaker here.
Chairman Chaffetz. Who's the--going back to what Mr.
Cummings says. Give me specific names. Who advised you on this
question? Who?
Mr. Dougherty. Well, it's ultimately----
Chairman Chaffetz. No, I want to know specifically who did
you have a discussion about this with? You're under oath. Give
me the answer.
Mr. Dougherty. With respect to multiple individuals.
Chairman Chaffetz. Go ahead. List them out. I've got time.
Go ahead.
Mr. Dougherty. Director Clancy, a number of other
individuals.
Chairman Chaffetz. No, no, name the individuals. You're a
smart man. You know these people's names. Name them.
Mr. Dougherty. The gentleman directly behind me, Mr.
Paramore. Our counsel, Donna Cahill. Those are the individuals.
Chairman Chaffetz. Those three, nobody else?
Mr. Dougherty. That's what I recall.
Chairman Chaffetz. Any other? I'll give you one more
chance. Anybody else advise you on how to----
Mr. Dougherty. I do not recall, Chairman.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay.
Mr. Dougherty. This has been a multipronged discussion, and
I've had multipronged discussions with your staff on this issue
to try and sort of find a way forward.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay. It's not acceptable. We shouldn't
have to wait this long. We're trying to do our jobs, and we're
trying to help you to do your jobs, but it requires
cooperation. And when I have to get to the point where I have
to issue a subpoena, I expect compliance, 100 percent
compliance. Understood?
Mr. Dougherty. Understood.
Chairman Chaffetz. We'll now recognize the gentleman from
Wisconsin, Mr. Grothman, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Grothman. Yeah. Kind of disturbing testimony. I think
we can kind of see why 79 percent say leadership is not honest
and trustworthy.
But in any event, a question for Mr. Roth. Before, the
topic of compensation came up. What is the base compensation
for the different Secret Service levels or officers?
Mr. Roth. I would not have that information.
Mr. Grothman. Does Mr. O'Carroll have that information?
Mr. O'Carroll. No, Mr. Grothman.
Mr. Grothman. Does any of the other guys have that
information?
Mr. Dougherty. That's on the OPM sort of, you know, general
schedule Web site. Basically you can find it there, and we can
certainly provide that information to you.
Mr. Grothman. Yeah, I know. But do you have any idea what
people make? Like, if I'm a Secret Service agent for 15 years,
what am I making? Nobody knows?
Mr. Dougherty. Approximately $145,000 base pay.
Mr. Grothman. Okay, 145,000----
Mr. Dougherty. A lot of hours for a little bit of pay.
Mr. Grothman. Okay. And so if the Secret Service--are they
getting overtime then above that?
Mr. Dougherty. They are for protection.
Mr. Grothman. Okay. So if I work 41 hours a week, I'm
getting more than 145,000?
Mr. Dougherty. They would receive overtime for protection.
They also receive leave pay, which effectively is law
enforcement availability pay. That's an additional 2 hours, but
that's beyond overtime.
Mr. Grothman. I guess there's some feeling that we're not
paying enough here. And maybe I'll ask Mr. O'Carroll. I mean,
to me, these are professional jobs, right? Don't you think
they're kind of professional jobs?
Mr. O'Carroll. Yes, sir.
Mr. Grothman. I mean, to me, anywhere in the world, if
you're making 145 grand, that's not a 40-hour-a-week job,
right? If I'm making 145 grand, I expect, I don't know, 45, 50,
55 hours a week, right, don't you think?
Mr. O'Carroll. Agreed. But as you notice from my testimony
at the beginning, is most of the agents in the campaign, you're
working 16-hour days. So they are putting more than a 40-hour
workweek.
Mr. Grothman. I know, but the question is, and I would
think this is particularly if you're doing the Presidential or
Presidential candidate detail, almost an honor, I guess it
surprises me that if you're making 145 grand a year, that on
your compensation, if you're working 45 hours a week, you're
expecting overtime. You see what I'm say something?
I mean, normally, you know, people who work for me, my
chief of staff, my deputy chief of staff, I mean, they're not
making that much, but they work more than 40 hours a week. I
work well over 40 hours a week because, but they pay us pretty
well for that.
I just am a little bit surprised that as a Secret Service
agent, if you're working 45 hours a week, you think that's
overtime or additional pay. You think that's right?
Mr. O'Carroll. Well, a couple of things on it just for
clarification. One, they are getting paid for some of that
overtime with that law enforcement availability pay. So, yes,
as we said, that above that $140,000 there would be some
overtime, that's automatically included.
And what we were bringing up, or one of our concerns of our
members is, is that it's capping out at the 15 step 10 level,
which is about 160,000. So technically, any agent after that,
with the caps on it, are working for free, and that was my
concern. So, again, we're kind of dealing with that----
Mr. Grothman. What I'm saying is, if you get up around 150,
you're expected to work more. I mean, that's what well-paid
people do.
Mr. O'Carroll. Yeah.
Mr. Grothman. Now, just a general question for Mr.
Dougherty. That 79 percent say leadership is not honest and
trustworthy, you want to comment on that? Why do you think
people are answering the questionnaire that way? Why do you
think that your agents think you're not honest and trustworthy
to that degree? I mean, that's just stunning. Could you give me
an opinion as to what's going on in their mind, in your
opinion?
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not sure when that particular survey or
number was established. Do recognize that we have had multiple
surveys and other things that basically sort of go to the issue
of confidence in leadership. I do think, though, that the
change of leadership with Director Clancy, keeping in mind that
he changed every single assistant director but for one
individual, and also, too, recreated the agency, that there has
been substantial changes in terms of that and the kinds of
things that we're trying to respond to.
Mr. Grothman. Why do you think in the past such a high
percentage thought leadership was so bad? What bad things were
they doing?
Mr. Dougherty. Well, I think that, first of all, the old
disciplinary process that we had basically contributed to that,
because effectively it was not very transparent, it wasn't
consistent, and it wasn't fair.
Mr. Grothman. Okay.
Mr. Dougherty. They had different decisionmakers basically
making those decisions.
Mr. Grothman. I cut you off. I'll ask the same question to
Mr. Roth. I'm almost out of my time.
Mr. Roth. It's difficult to know. Certainly those
questions, the answer to those questions have been consistent
over time. One of the things that we talk about when we talk
about an ethical culture is to have a tone at the top, the
right kind of tone at the top, having systems in place to
enforce that culture, and then actually doing something about
it.
So in relation, for example, to the discipline that was
imposed on the individuals that accessed, in violation of the
Privacy Act, Chairman Chaffetz's records, I think that
discipline was inadequate, and I think it's perceived of as a
dual standard.
Mr. Grothman. Okay. I just want--well, in my life, I'm
trying to go back in my life, all the bosses I've had, if I
ever felt anybody was untrustworthy and not honest, and I
really can't think of any of my bosses I felt that way about.
So when you have that many think that poorly about the people
who run the Secret Service, it's kind of scary. But I've run
out of my time, so thank you.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll now recognize the gentleman from Virginia, Mr.
Connolly, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Great to be back.
Mr. Roth, why does anybody in the Secret Service need
overtime?
Mr. Roth. We haven't looked at that, Congressman. I'm not
sure what you're getting at. It's not part of our audit
reports.
Mr. Connolly. Well, I mean, if you had a full workforce
with fully staffed shifts, in theory, ideally, you'd never need
overtime. Isn't that correct?
Mr. Roth. Understood. Correct. There had not been a
staffing plan that had been established previous to just
recently. So essentially, the Secret Service was understaffed,
forcing people to work overtime, eliminating training that was
necessary for them to do their jobs.
Mr. Connolly. Okay.
Mr. Roth. So that's why they needed the overtime.
Mr. Connolly. And how pervasive of a problem is that, that
understaffing that requires more and more overtime?
Mr. Roth. It is significant. As we talked about when we
looked at the PMP report, certainly in 2015 they had 6,350
people on board. The estimate was that they needed 7,600 people
on board, so about 1,300 more individuals, to have the kind of
staffing that would minimize, although not eliminate overtime,
because that's the nature of law enforcement, that there's
always overtime, but also allow for adequate training.
Mr. Connolly. So the fact that we're, if we'll stipulate
your numbers, we're 1,300 understaffed, that's a lot. That's
about 20-something percent of the ideal workforce, right?
Mr. Roth. Correct. And, again, what I'm talking about is
numbers from 2015.
Mr. Connolly. No, I understand.
Mr. Roth. It has gone up since.
Mr. Connolly. Right.
Mr. Roth. Yes, it is significant.
Mr. Connolly. So the Secret Service has to fall back on
overtime if it's going to carry out its duties.
Mr. Roth. Precisely.
Mr. Connolly. And if it doesn't do that, if it actually
just keeps people to their shift, no overtime, what's the risk?
Mr. Roth. Well, obviously, it's a risk of mission failure.
Mr. Connolly. And does that put lives in jeopardy?
Mr. Roth. It absolutely does.
Mr. Connolly. Because this isn't just any mission.
Mr. Roth. That's correct.
Mr. Connolly. And, of course, in an election year, the
demands on the Secret Service are that much greater.
Mr. Roth. Correct.
Mr. Connolly. Especially this one maybe. That's my
editorial comment; you don't have to comment.
All right. So Congress certainly has recognized this
problem, right, and rushed to fill in the gap and make sure
that you had either the overtime you need and/or the staffing
you need so that this sacred mission is not compromised and
nobody is at risk. Is that not what's happened, Mr. Dougherty?
Mr. Dougherty. Congressman Connolly, first of all, if I can
at least observe that the law provides for the payment of
overtime for Secret Service agents as well as other law
enforcement. Really, the issue that we're talking about just
simply is the cap to the law that Congress has established
relative to payment of compensation for law enforcement.
Having said that, I totally agree with you, though, that
really the resolution to the problem, of course, in trying to
make sure that the Service can continue to do its mission is
both funding and also to the law, sort of a recognition that at
least that we have a unique mission which requires an awful lot
of hours by individuals to sort of continue to do what they're
doing.
Mr. Connolly. Yes. Mr. Dougherty, my time is running out
and I was going to get to the point you brought up, and thank
you for bringing it up.
So this pay cap Congress has imposed. Is that correct?
Mr. Dougherty. Actually, I think we are excited at the idea
that the committee effectively has sponsored legislation----
Mr. Connolly. Not my question, Mr. Dougherty. Is there a
pay cap or not on overtime, absent other legislative action?
Mr. Dougherty. You are correct, sir.
Mr. Connolly. Yes. And does that pay cap in any way affect
performance or morale of Secret Service agents who are doing
their duty and putting in the overtime, whether they're getting
paid--whether there's a pay cap or not? Is that not correct?
Mr. Dougherty. I think that's the nub of the question.
Mr. Connolly. Yes.
Mr. Dougherty. And I believe, sir, that the answer is yes,
that when you ask individuals--it's one thing to ask an
individual to go and do their job. It's another thing, though,
to say, do your job and, by the way, at this point in time in
your workweek you're not getting compensated any further.
I believe that this is simply an unintended consequence to
the way that Congress sort of struck the ceiling or the cap,
not taking into consideration the specialized missions that
certain organizations have. And the Secret Service's, I think,
is a unique one with respect to that, particularly given the
recurring sort of nature of the campaign. Every 4 years we kind
of run into this. This was not a problem that just existed in
2016; it has been a problem that's been in existence going back
to multiple campaigns.
Mr. Connolly. Yes. I take your point. And my time is up.
But I would simply say, we hear a lot about, you know, we ought
to run government like a business. I don't know any business
that would say to its employees, we're going to set, you know,
virtually limitless hours for you to work and we're only going
to compensate you for part of that. And I just think we in
Congress have a responsibility to revisit that issue and
address it in a responsible way so that the Secret Service is
adequately compensated and your mission is successful.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Dougherty. Thank you, Congressman Connolly. Thank you
very much.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll recognize the gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Palmer.
Mr. Palmer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Dougherty, are you aware that in the list of best
places to work in the Federal Government in 2015 that Secret
Service ranks 319th out of 320?
Mr. Dougherty. I am aware of that.
Mr. Palmer. Did it ever occur to you that there might be a
connection between the fact that 79 percent of the rank and
file that work for the Secret Service, the men and women in
uniform and in the protective detail, that that might have
something to do with that low ranking?
Mr. Dougherty. That ranking is connected to a lot of
things.
Mr. Palmer. Well, I can assure you that when 79 percent
don't trust leadership, it's going to be reflected in your
ranking.
And I'm sitting here listening to this and listening to you
guys talk about the overtime. And we had a hearing back in
March of 2015, and it turns out that in that hearing we found
out that the uniformed officers were now getting only, like, 25
minutes of training and that your protection detail had
previously been spending 25 percent of their on-duty time in
training. It's now down to 2 percent. And then you're working
these hours. I think Mr. Thomas Perrelli in a February hearing
indicated maybe 58 hours. So you're working these people, and
then you're providing them, in my opinion, untrustworthy
leadership.
And I just want to bring up something here, and going back
to Mr. Gowdy's questions. Assistant Director Edward Lowery, who
was recently promoted to that, does he have a misconduct
citation in his record?
Mr. Dougherty. Again, I serve as the chief strategy officer
for the Secret Service. I'm not involved in the disciplinary
process. I cannot answer that question.
Mr. Palmer. I'm not asking you if you were involved in
discipline. I'm asking you a direct question. It's a yes or no,
or you can say you don't know.
Mr. Dougherty. I don't know.
Mr. Palmer. Okay. You know, he is the one who sent out an
email that said that there is some information that he might
find embarrassing that needs to get out. The ``he'' he was
referring to is Mr. Chaffetz, Chairman Chaffetz.
There's 10 new assistant directors that have been promoted.
I've got a list here. Forty-one alleged misconduct or people
charged with misconduct. How many of the 10 new assistant
directors do you think might be on this list? Could you answer
that for me?
Mr. Dougherty. I cannot.
Mr. Palmer. Could you find out and let us know?
Mr. Dougherty. Yes.
Mr. Palmer. I appreciate that. Would you also let us know
if Mr. Lowery is one of those?
Mr. Dougherty. Yes.
Mr. Palmer. Nodding your head I take is an affirmative.
Thank you.
I also would like to point out that this appears to be
problematic in the Department of Homeland Security, because
among the large agencies Homeland Security ranks last, and they
ranked last in 2014 and 2015. And I just think this is
indicative, Mr. Chairman, of a major issue with management.
And, again, going back to the fact that 79 percent say that
they find management not, you know, that they're not honest and
not trustworthy, makes it look like management is more
interested in protecting management than they are looking out
for the men and women who are putting their lives on the line.
And you're wearing them out. I can tell you as a former
athlete that--and particularly in football--when you got in the
fourth quarter fatigue would make a difference. I don't care--
and you've reduced their training down to such low levels that
you combine that with fatigue and you're looking for a
disaster. And then on top of that, you operate the agency in
such a way that really is reprehensible. I've heard that word
used once before.
I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to continue
to protect management? Are you going to continue to deny the
committee the documents that we've requested? Because our
objective is not necessarily to get anyone. Our objective is to
restore the credibility and reputation of the Secret Service so
that the men and women who serve the Secret Service can do
their job, can get paid what they should get paid, and can get
home safe. Is that too much to ask?
Mr. Dougherty. I appreciate the sports analogy, because I
use them all the time.
Frankly, that's why we're coming here and doing the
quarterly updates, to show you the things that we're doing. And
yes, we have been talking to the committee to basically sort of
resolve this ultimate issue about the records.
Mr. Palmer. The chairman has pointed out that we've made
multiple requests. We've subpoenaed the documents that we think
are important to getting the Secret Service back to the level
of expertise and credibility that they've enjoyed for their
entire existence, but you've denied us those documents. We've
got cases here where there's misconduct that's gone really
unpunished. And if you want to restore your rank and file's
confidence in the agency, you need to work with us.
I yield back.
Chairman Chaffetz. I thank the gentleman.
I'll recognize myself for a series of questions as we
conclude this hearing.
Inspector General Roth thought we were roughly 1,300 people
short of where we need to be right now. Mr. Dougherty, is that
your understanding? Is 1,300 how many we're short?
Mr. Dougherty. I'm not following exactly where he gets the
number 1,300. I can tell you sort of what we've plotted out
through our strategic human capital plan effectively. If you're
going to get ourselves back to the 7,024 or you're going to get
us to the number 8,300 effective, which we've plotted out all
those numbers, we have tried to assess through new models for
personnel where we think we ought to be.
Chairman Chaffetz. And I appreciate that and we want you to
share that in its totality with the committee. What I'm trying
to understand is how far short of those goals as you plot it
moving forward, much to what Mr. Lynch put up on the chart
which was part of our graph. How far short are we? And if you
can't answer right off the cuff----
Mr. Dougherty. I can't answer right off, but I would be
glad to provide that information and number to you.
Mr. Dougherty. I think it does, though, tie, though, to the
plan that we have given to the Congress in June of 2015. And we
continue to update our strategic human capital plan, and we're
having our models revalidated by an outside contractor to make
sure that we are in the right place on that as well.
Chairman Chaffetz. It is something of keen interest--Mr.
Cummings referred to it, so many of us have referred to it--is
how many we're short. I liken this to a bathtub. You know, you
try to keep filling it up in the top, but the drain at the
bottom, the attrition is so great. And until you get ahead of
that curve, you can't get people with reasonable lives. We want
them to have a personal life. We want them to be able to do
these things.
And we recognize the surge that happens during a
Presidential campaign, but what we also see is that, according
to the numbers you've given us, agents only spend about a third
of their time on protective-related activities during non-
Presidential years and just barely over half their time during
Presidential years.
So if you're spending 50 percent to two-thirds of their
time on activities outside of the protective mission, it does
beg the question that I will continue to pursue, which is,
should we shed off all the things that you're supposed to be
doing as it relates to cyber and cyber defenses? Because look
at the irony here. We're hearing reports from the inspector
general you don't even have the basic systems in place to deal
with some of the most basic things we have.
Mr. Nally, you said something. You said, quote, ``All this
has been rectified.'' I want to give you a chance to help
clarify that, because I have pictures of your office where
somebody emails in their application. It's printed out. It's
stacked up in the hallway, not in a secure setting. It's behind
a locked door, but certainly not in a secure setting. And then
you retype it in?
How arcane, how bad is the personnel system, both in terms
of hiring and tracking current employees? Are you where you
want to be?
General Nally. Mr. Chairman, I'll never be where I want to
be.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay. Where are you at now? I mean,
okay, great. That's a philosophical thing. But where are you
at? If I pulled out somebody's name, I pulled out Jane Doe out
of the file and I said, show me employee number 1,233, could
you tell me how many hours she's worked?
No, no, I want to ask Mr. Nally. He's the CIO.
Could you tell me that?
General Nally. I don't know, because I don't have access to
that system.
Chairman Chaffetz. Can the system pull up that information?
Does the system track personnel's hours worked?
Mr. Dougherty. Chairman Chaffetz, I run that part of the
Secret Service.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay. Go ahead.
Mr. Dougherty. The answer is yes. And we have provided to
the committee staff our annual performance statistics. I'll be
glad to provide them again.
Chairman Chaffetz. But can you, by the personnel--if I took
a random sampling, if Mr. Roth came in here and took a random
sample of the personnel, could he tell me that Jane Doe worked
this many hours?
Mr. Dougherty. I believe that we can.
Chairman Chaffetz. Mr. Roth, is that something you can do
in short order? Can we take a random sampling and track these
employees? I mean, when you get into an SES employee or a GS-15
employee, can you track that?
Mr. Roth. We don't know. I'd have to check with my folks to
see if that's doable.
Chairman Chaffetz. So here's the problem. I've sponsored a
bill to loosen up $22 million to pay people for the overtime
they worked in just 2016, but I need some assurance that you're
not just going to hand this out like candy and say, well, you
get, you know, 20,000 and you get 15,000, unless there's some
real metrics and some documentation that shows that this person
worked 43 straight days at 13 hours a day.
Mr. Dougherty. I know I can provide that data, and I can
provide that assurance as to who's getting overtime and when
they're getting it and how they're going to get it.
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay.
Mr. Dougherty. Again, we have those performance metrics. If
we do anything right, we do a really good job of that, of sort
of understanding. Besides, we pay these people and we have to
have an understanding as to the hours that they worked.
So I do think that we're in the right place on this. I'll
be glad to provide any information to you to satisfy this
inquiry.
Chairman Chaffetz. Is there a scheduling system in place
now so people can see where--and granted, protectees change
where they're going to be at a moment's notice and I get that.
But can agents have visibility on when they're projected to
work over, say, the next 7 days?
Mr. Dougherty. So that's--go ahead.
General Nally. Excuse me.
Mr. Chairman, we have a system that will be IOC, initial
operational capable. It's called UD, Uniformed Division/RMS,
Resource Management System, that will be IOC the first week in
December. It's a modernized program that's taking the current
scheduling system and automating it.
For example, the agents and duty officers do have an
application on their phone that we currently issue them and
they use where they can put in for leave or, say, a sick day
off, et cetera, that's an automated process. Come the first
week in December, they're going to be able to have laid out a
scheduling system for those officers. It's automated. It's an
agile approach that we're using. We have UD officers involved
in the process. And currently, this week out at the RTC we have
user verification testing on that system.
Chairman Chaffetz. Mr. Roth, I just would like--agents,
officers, they need to be able to know when they're going to
work. We heard this horror story last time. It was Wednesday
before Thanksgiving, and they didn't know if they were working
on Thanksgiving and what time. They said, I'm happy to work on
Thanksgiving, just tell me if I've got to have breakfast with
my family or dinner with my family, I can't see it. And I want
to make sure that that is solved.
Mr. Dougherty, do we have enough personnel? Do you need any
assistance to help with the inauguration?
Mr. Dougherty. I think you've seen the model or heard of
the model before. The model for NSSEs is a really well-
developed model for the Secret Service. And that model has
been, as we speak, has been already implemented.
Chairman Chaffetz. All I'm asking on that topic, I just
want the inspector general to go in and look at it and report
back and tell us what he's found.
Mr. Dougherty. And we are collaborating----
Chairman Chaffetz. Okay.
Mr. Dougherty. --with everybody that we need in order to--
--
Chairman Chaffetz. That's all. That's all. I don't even
need an answer from you on that. I want the inspector general
to find out if that part is working. The application portion of
it, the tracking of overtime, and the projection on when
they're going to work in the future. Sort of the beginning, the
middle, and the end. I just want him to come back to us and
share with us his findings.
Do you have enough personnel or do you need any assistance
to successfully get us through this inauguration?
Mr. Dougherty. Our normal model, basically, is to go and
collaborate with as many people that we have to, whether it's
State and local, other Federal law enforcement, DHS, of course.
So I think the answer is yes, the model is there and the plan
will be there.
Chairman Chaffetz. And to the inspector general, the other
thing I would like to get at is, again, we've highlighted this,
but we're going to continue to highlight this. I do believe
there's a very significant attrition problem. These are good,
high-paying jobs, don't get me wrong here, but the amount of
overtime is so excessive.
We have to get to a point--and keep in mind the imperative
here. It is amazing what they've done and what they will do.
And this is where I want to conclude, with the same thing we
started with. We cannot thank them enough, the men and women
who are actually out there on the front lines doing this day in
and day out.
And I can't imagine, whether I was single or married or
whatever, or had a loved one or just a mom and dad who cared
about me or just somebody who's out there by themselves,
looking at the calendar ahead and thinking, gosh, you know
what, I got another 15 days in this month and I'm not going to
get paid a dime, and continuing to do that. That's how
dedicated these men and women are. I want to help solve that by
loosening up $22 million so that we can give relief to almost
everybody.
But the long-term way to solve this is to get to the proper
staffing levels. They'll do it, they'll work 15 hours a day.
But you know what, when you're working 43 days straight, as the
one example, and you're pulling 12-, 14-hour shifts, and you're
sleeping in a different bed every night because the candidate's
traveling all over the country or, you know, right now
President Obama is off in Greece and traveling around the
world, we need them to be able to do that.
But you don't want an agent who's exhausted and tired and
can't figure out how they're going to pay for the child care,
because they're not even getting compensated and they're not
there to help fix the door or the toilet or whatever it might
be. We have to get to the proper staffing levels, and we want
to help there.
Mr. Nally, rather than saying all this has been rectified
and that you will never be satisfied, all laudable things, two
just bits or words of advice. Be honest and candid in terms of
your assessment of your capabilities. And, number two, you need
to share with us what you're trying to do and what impediments
are in the way.
The other thing I would lastly suggest is, it doesn't need
to be all reinvented by yourselves. It's a large Federal
Government. You're not the first one to run into a staffing
shortage. The Office of Personnel Management should be the one
to help agencies and departments figure this out.
I worry that every time we look around somebody has got to
come up with their own staffing software, you know. And law
enforcement is different than how they're going to do it at,
you know, the Bureau of Land Management, I get that.
But, please, let's be smart in this and let's solve this
problem, give these people some relief so they're fresh,
they're satisfied, they're fully compensated.
I thank you all for your expertise and your dedication and
your patriotism. We have to get this mission right, and that's
the spirit in which we have this hearing. So I thank you all
for being here today.
The committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:06 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
APPENDIX
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