In the days before Donald Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the Secret Service needed a member of his protective detail to develop a security plan to keep the former president safe as he addressed a crowd of thousands at an open-air fairground.

With agents stretched thin by the presidential campaign, the agency turned to a “junior” member of the detail, according to an independent review panel commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security.

In the past, the Secret Service would have trained new agents in a field office for a minimum of five years and had them work at least two more in a protective detail before assigning them to oversee such a large public event, multiple former agents told The Washington Post. The agent put in charge of security at Butler had joined the Secret Service four years earlier and only started in the protective detail in 2023, the panel found.

“If an agent with this little experience was responsible for planning Butler, that means there was nobody else,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a security executive and former supervisor on then-President Barack Obama’s Secret Service detail. “Now we are introducing hope as a strategy. And that is just plain dangerous. ”

The July 13 shooting, in which the agency’s failure to block sight lines from a nearby rooftop allowed a gunman with limited firearms training to come close to killing Trump, stunned many Americans and prompted lawmakers to ask what had happened to an agency long charged with keeping sitting and former presidents safe. Besides a bullet that grazed Trump’s ear, the shooting left one spectator dead and two injured.

The causes of the mistakes in Butler, the Secret Service’s biggest security failure since the 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, had been years in the making, a Post review found.

Spurred by a string of humiliating security lapses during the Obama administration, the White House and Congress launched separate investigations in 2014 that diagnosed the Secret Service as being in crisis and stretched beyond its abilities. The investigative panels recommended sharp increases in agent training and the hiring of fresh leadership to disrupt an insular culture that the probes said tended to cover up problems rather than own and fix them.

But three presidents and Congress have failed to fix the major vulnerabilities in the Secret Service that were identified a decade ago, the Post review has found. Instead, some problems have grown worse and left the agency weaker on key measures. For instance, the agency was never able to hire enough staff to spare agents for routine training; instead its mission expanded and was shouldered by an overworked workforce, leading to burnout and low morale.

An exodus of veteran agents over the past 10 years forced the agency to rely even more on less experienced agents, a Post analysis of internal workforce data revealed. Recruits with five years or less on the job made up 13% of the agent workforce in 2015, but this year they make up nearly 40%, The Post found.

In 2014, the White House-commissioned investigation urged that the Secret Service’s most elite agents, those who protect the president, spend 25% of their work time in training. But since that recommendation, they have each year only clocked between 3 and 7%, government records show.

With one brief exception, all three presidents in the past 10 years rejected a key recommendation to appoint an outsider to lead — and reform — the agency. Obama tapped his former detail leader, a Secret Service lifer. As president, Trump chose an outsider for director, but soon fired and replaced him with a 24-year veteran of the Service. President Joe Biden chose a senior member of his previous vice-presidential detail.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency implemented 13 of the 19 changes recommended by the White House-commissioned investigation but did not have funding to complete the job.

“Resource constraints hindered our ability to fully implement all of the panel’s recommendations,” Guglielmi said. He added that a massive funding request advanced by the White House and presented to Congress in the months after the Butler shooting would expand the staff and build a new training facility “so we can finally move the Secret Service to a more sustainable training model.”

The Service’s annual funding has risen in the past eight years, from $2.3 billion in the 2017 fiscal year to roughly $3.1 billion in 2024. After adjusting for inflation, that amounts to a 5% increase, which did not come close to covering the 30% increase in security details and expenditures stemming from a rising threat environment, Secret Service leaders said.

Guglielmi declined to comment on individual agents’ actions in Butler or the experience required for their assignments, noting that agency leaders are conducting a review of the Butler incident and are expected to decide soon whether to discipline agents involved. He said the Secret Service is committed to ensuring the security lapses that contributed to the shooting never recur.

The two investigations a decade ago, one led by the House Oversight Committee and the other a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the Obama administration, were launched after a man was able to jump the White House fence in 2014, scramble across the yard and get inside the building.

The panel called the breach a “catastrophic failure of training,” noting that a relatively new officer armed with a gun let the intruder enter through the front door in part because he had no clear training for what to do in that circumstance. It also found that members of an emergency response team on the grounds that day did not chase the intruder inside because they had never trained inside the White House. That spurred a recommendation to expand the Secret Service’s training facility to add a replica of the presidential mansion and grounds.

The two investigations also scrutinized additional security mishaps revealed by The Post, including the Secret Service’s fumbling response when a would-be assassin strafed the White House residence with gunfire in 2011, and the agency allowing a private security guard with an arrest record to stand inches from Obama in 2014, after failing to run required background checks on him and other event staff.

Those investigative panels warned that the lives of future presidents and other top leaders would remain at heightened risk without the reforms they urged for the Secret Service. The blue-ribbon panel described training and leadership changes as among the most critical of its 19 recommendations.

Jeh Johnson, then-Secretary of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, lamented at the time that several recommendations were similar to changes proposed in earlier reviews of the Secret Service — but never implemented. “This time must be different,” Johnson said.

But in critical ways, it was not. While the government acted on a recommendation to add 85 special agents, they were quickly absorbed into an agency that at the time was overwhelmed by the record-breaking travel of the newly arrived President Trump and the task of protecting members of his extended family. The Service went from 29 full-time details under Obama to 42 after Trump came into office, according to a Secret Service official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security arrangements.

The Trump and Biden administrations, along with Congress, made modest additions to the workforce, adding a few to several dozen agents in a year. But those additions only helped the Service try to keep up with the rising workload and were not enough to spare agents for dedicated training time, according to Secret Service officials.

Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, recently told The Post he pressed the White House budget office to add $200 million to the president’s proposed $2.8 billion budget for the Service in 2022 to construct the mock White House training facility. The White House turned him down, he said.

“I have fought intensely for additional resources,” said Mayorkas, who was deputy secretary when the agency was under fire in 2014 and helped investigate the fence jumper incident. “I have fought tooth and nail for a reform of their training facility and more people.”

Since the Butler shooting, he and the administration have requested a $2.3 billion injection, on top of the Secret Service’s existing budget, administration officials said. Congress approved $231 million of that as an emergency supplement to the agency in September.

Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned as director in the wake of the Butler attack, said Congress and presidents have historically poured money into the Secret Service only after serious attacks or failures. Arriving in 2022, she sped up hiring and offered retention bonuses to try to slow departures, but she said the agency needs a far bigger team to meet its mission.

The Service in the past had modest protection teams for first ladies and the family members of presidents, but by the time Trump took office in 2017, the increasingly perilous threat environment required agents to travel the globe with Trump’s grown sons and secure a midtown-Manhattan skyscraper, Melania Trump’s temporary home at Trump Tower in 2017.

“It’s sad that tragedy has to occur for focus and help to come to an agency,” Cheatle said of resistance by presidents and Congress to give the agency more money. “If you are humming along, and you’re not the squeaky wheel, the assumption is, things are fine, they don’t need anything more.”

The Biden White House declined to comment. An administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the White House proposed and Congress approved adding 275 officers and agents to the agency over Biden’s tenure, which led to new hiring.

In response to questions, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung issued a statement that did not address why the first Trump administration failed to follow through on the recommendations for outside leadership and increased training. He accused The Post of “disgustingly” seeking to blame the Trump administration for the attempted assassination.

A spokesperson for the Obama administration declined to comment.

In 2021, the Service set an aspirational goal to meet its expanded mission by increasing its overall workforce from 7,896 that year to 9,595 in 2025. But partly because of high attrition rates, the Service ended last year with a workforce of roughly 7,700, according to a review of internal data gathered by the Government Accountability Office.

Max Stier, the president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on improving management of the federal government, said the lack of critical reforms and reinforcements led to staff burnout, which naturally fueled the departures of droves of midcareer agents.

“We should know that if we don’t do better in investing in leaders and workforce, we won’t get what we need from our government,” Stier said. “Low morale drives talented people out. More departures create lower morale.”

During the campaign season, workload and staffing levels were such that agents could not take leaves, Secret Service officials said in describing one of the sources of burnout.

Stier said Secret Service staff have consistently ranked their agency as one of the worst places to work in the federal government, a low morale rating that he said should have alerted administration leaders to take action.

Since 2015, agents with more than a decade on the job have resigned at alarming rates rather than stay until their 20-year retirement mark, according to internal data obtained by The Post.

Secret Service officials, recognizing the potential damage from a particularly large exit of senior agents in 2022, tried to stem the departures by offering $25,000 retention payments for those who agreed to stay.

But the initiative was not enough to reverse the trend, data shows.

In 2015, veteran agents with 11 to 15 years of experience made up nearly one-third of the Secret Service agent workforce, a Post analysis of internal records found. They now make up just 8%, a massive experience drain of the people who typically teach and supervise recruits.

“The red lights were blinking, and Congress and our national leaders were not paying attention,” Stier said. “Right now the U.S. Secret Service is in a negative downward spiral.”

The independent panel that reviewed the Butler shooting identified numerous security lapses: The rooftop where the gunman positioned himself was not secured; sight lines from there to the stage were not properly obstructed; law enforcement agencies on the ground could not communicate effectively. The panel also faulted senior supervisors for assigning a relatively inexperienced agent to lead the security planning, and for failing to detect and address vulnerabilities in the plan. Supervisors did not adequately consider the agent’s “level of experience and associated aptitude and training, or lack thereof, for contributing to the planning of a major outdoor rally event like Butler,” the panel said.

The day before the July 4 holiday, agent Myosoty Perez learned she had been assigned as the “site agent” for the rally that was to be held in Butler just 10 days later. In that role, Perez would spend several days in Butler leading what was called “the advance,” by planning for a security bubble around Trump.

The independent review panel commissioned by Mayorkas did not identify Perez by name, referring to her as the “site agent.” The Post confirmed her name and those of other agents involved in security that day from officials and others familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security subjects. The Post also learned details of agents’ accounts by reviewing transcripts of interviews given for congressional investigations of the incident.

Perez was one of the few agents on Trump’s 60-member detail who was available, given Trump’s busy travel and campaign schedule over the summer, the panel found. The candidate had clocked seven rallies in the previous 30 days and would soon head to the Republican National Convention, requiring numerous agents to spearhead advances across the country, according to Secret Service officials and Trump’s campaign schedule.

“The site agent assigned by the Trump detail to coordinate with the Pittsburgh field office to conduct site advance work and site security planning for the Butler rally only graduated from the Service’s academy in 2020, had only been on the Trump detail since 2023, and had engaged in minimal previous site advance work or site security planning and certainly nothing to the level of the July 13 Butler rally,” the independent panel wrote in its report.

Through a lawyer, Perez, one of the agents whose actions are under review by the Secret Service, declined to comment.

Two more-seasoned agents from the Pittsburgh office were assigned to help Perez with the security plan. Dana DuBrey, Perez’s local counterpart agent, had suffered a foot injury and was not supposed to be working, but she reported for duty anyway, according to officials and others briefed on the incident. Meredith Bank, the “lead advance” agent, was responsible for coordinating with local police for Trump’s security from the time he landed at the Butler airport until he departed.

Lawyers for these two agents also declined to comment in response to written questions from The Post.

In helping advise on a site plan in the days before Trump’s arrival, Bank and DuBrey repeatedly expressed concern about the need to block the line of sight from several areas around the field, according to transcripts of interviews they gave for separate House and Senate investigations. That included the building owned by AGR International — just 150 yards from the rally stage — which would-be assassin Thomas Crooks would later use as his platform to shoot at Trump.

Bank and DuBrey said in the interviews that they asked Trump campaign staff about positioning some of the campaign’s Penske trucks between Trump’s stage and the AGR building to create a physical block. Bank and DuBrey said the campaign resisted, saying large equipment close to the rally could interfere with good press shots of the event.

“Trucks were discussed to block line of sight and denied by DJT staff,” Pittsburgh field office agents wrote in an email that was cited during those interviews and has not been previously reported.

According to transcripts of her interviews with congressional investigators, DuBrey said she and the campaign discussed other physical blocks to address the line-of-sight concern, such as farm equipment, bleachers, and flags and banners. Bank said she warned the campaign that a senior supervisor from Trump’s detail, Nick Menster, would want a solution when he arrived on Friday, the day before the event.

It is routine for campaign staff and Secret Service site agents to haggle over security plans for such events, with agents erring on the side of caution. It is also typical for Secret Service supervisors to overrule campaign objections.

Menster, a 17-year veteran of the agency, told congressional investigators that he had understood farm equipment would block the AGR building and said Perez did not raise a line-of-sight problem with him, according to a person familiar with his account. In reviewing Perez’s site plan and symbols that marked the location of local police, Menster believed that local counter snipers would be stationed on the roof of the AGR building to mitigate risk of an attack, according to one Secret Service official and the person familiar with his account. He did not inquire further to make sure this step would be taken to secure the building, the panel found.

In the end, no local police were specifically assigned to secure the roof, the independent panel found.

Bank and DuBrey told investigators that they did not realize the clear line of sight from the AGR building had not been properly blocked until after the rally was underway, according to transcripts of their interviews.

Perez, DuBrey, Bank and Tim Burke, the head of the Pittsburgh field office, have been assigned to telework pending the conclusion of the agency’s review of the incident, and Perez and Burke have been reassigned unrelated to the review, administration officials said. Lawyers for Menster and Burke declined to comment in response to written questions from The Post.

Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said: “The responsibility of the U.S. Secret Service is to protect President Donald J. Trump. Based on the sworn testimony, they abdicated that responsibility and their dereliction resulted in President Trump being shot in the ear, one death and injuries to others.”

Another Secret Service agent on Trump’s detail assigned to scan the skies over the candidate at Butler had similarly insufficient training for his task, the panel found. He was supposed to operate a device to spot suspicious drones in the area but struggled to get it to work on July 13, it found. The agent had only operated the device twice before; his training was limited to an informal tutorial by a fellow agent.

The agent, whose name The Post could not learn, spent five hours on the day of the rally, including on the phone with tech support, trying to get the device to operate and finally succeeded at 4:30 p.m. The result, the panel said, was he missed an opportunity to spot the gunman, who had sent a drone over the farmgrounds for about 10 minutes shortly before 4 p.m.

In the wake of the Butler shooting, the Biden administration and Mayorkas have been working with Congress on the administration’s record-setting request for the $2.3 billion injection into the Secret Service — the equivalent of a 74% addition to the agency’s annual budget. The proposal would add 1,000 law enforcement agents and officers and invest more than $500 million to both build the mock White House and begin a sweeping upgrade of the agency’s training facilities. President-elect Trump will soon get to decide whether to embrace another key recommendation made a decade ago and revived in the wake of Butler: to hire an outsider to lead the agency.

Aaron Schaffer, Jacob Bogage and Alice Crites contributed to this report.