A gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner with the President, Vice President, and most of the Cabinet in the same room. The Secret Service Director called the setup “perfect.” On this episode of On Background, Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers are joined by former House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz to examine what actually happened, what the agency is still hiding, and why a decade of warnings has produced almost no reform.

Chaffetz, who led the most aggressive Secret Service oversight in modern congressional history and authored a 2015 committee report titled “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis,” walks through the structural failures that have only worsened. The average Secret Service employee receives 30 minutes of training per year. The agency is roughly 1,000 agents short. Many uniformed officers patrol the White House grounds without ever having been inside the building. The promised White House training replica has ballooned from $8 million to more than $140 million.

Susan adds her latest reporting, including new details about the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt, the supervisors who were promoted instead of disciplined, the campaign’s request to remove the farm equipment that would have blocked the gunman’s line of sight, and an internal culture that has stopped responding to her questions since her exclusive reporting on a Secret Service agent investigated for alleged tax fraud.

The episode also covers Director Sean Curran’s leadership, the missing transparency about which officer was actually hit, ongoing congressional briefings led by Chairman James Comer, and the six structural reforms Chaffetz says must happen before the World Cup brings unprecedented protective demands to American soil.

This is a sober look at the institution charged with protecting American leaders, and the consequences of letting it fail in slow motion.

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