The agency encountered drones for years without revising its policies until the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
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The Secret Service should update its procedures for protecting the president, as well as other officials traveling abroad, protocols that haven’t changed since 1991, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday.
The congressional watchdog’s findings come as the elite protection force faces scrutiny for its handling of multiple assassination attempts against President Donald Trump, as well as the use of Air Force One as a decoy to fly him out of Turkey in July. Last week the agency put its spokesman and two other officials on administrative leave in a misconduct investigation, without further public explanation.
The GAO reviewed 83 incidents from 2015 to 2025 in which some event interrupted the Secret Service’s normal protective activities, including the July 2024 assassination attempt on then-candidate Trump. The agency updated policies in response to 25 of those incidents but not the others. The Secret Service doesn’t require officials to document why they determined changes weren’t needed.
“More often than not, the Secret Service has not updated its protection policies following security incidents, and Secret Service policy does not require its personnel to document their rationale for maintaining the status quo in these instances,” investigators led by Nathan Tranquilli wrote. “As a result, the Secret Service does not have complete information when considering whether to update protection policies.”
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Some of that missing information might have helped prevent future attacks, the report said. Specifically, the agency had multiple incidents involving drones from 2015 to 2021 but never changed its policies or said why. In the 2024 assassination attempt, the shooter used a drone to survey the area, and the agency failed to detect it.
The Secret Service also failed to follow its own policy, which calls for reviewing new procedures within four years of being issued, the GAO found.
The departments of State and Homeland Security agreed to implement the GAO’s recommendations, the watchdog said.
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