The mindless gnomes of the General Services Administration and
the highly-trained agents of the United States Secret Service have
one thing in common: they are all federal civil servants. But the
difference between them, and the import of the scandals now hanging
heavily over both agencies, are symptoms of something bigger that
we ignore at our peril.
We expect very little from the GSA, and we get it. The GSA
culture on display in the planning, execution, and celebration of
their infamous $800,000 Las Vegas conference was the inevitable
result of the permissive “you’ll die before you can get fired”
culture that predominates many federal bureaucracies. The GSA’ers
are fat, dumb, and happy in their jobs and have no interest in
being responsible stewards of the public purse. Like so many other
dysfunctional agencies, GSA should be disbanded entirely, which can
be done without much effect on anything else.
The GSA scandal gives the lie to the liberal ideology. More
government isn’t better government. More government, and an
ever-expanding unaccountable bureaucracy, means more waste, fraud,
and misbehavior by civil servants who don’t believe they’ll ever be
fired for bad job performance.
But the Secret Service is not the GSA, the Department of
Education, or HHS. It’s a law enforcement agency, an intelligence
agency and it has close connections to the military. It and the
rest of the law enforcement community have a lot in common with the
military in terms of culture, mindset and — most importantly —
sense of duty.
When a dozen or more Secret Service agents chose to party with
hookers at the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, Colombia, their decision
was a deviation from the military-law enforcement culture which
needs to be as closely examined as the misbehavior they apparently
engaged in. Part of it may be a diminution of character, as Peggy
Noonan
wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
But it is much more than that. The deviation from Secret Service
practice and tradition demonstrated by the hooker party was a
knowing and intentional abandonment of their duty.
Duty is a concept little known outside the military and law
enforcement communities. Military members and law enforcement
officers — including Secret Service agents — take an oath which
requires them to perform the duties of their office and obey the
lawful orders they are given with the understanding that those
duties may cost them their lives. Like the military, the Secret
Service people are volunteers. And, like military members, Secret
Service agents undertake those risks willingly and by taking their
oath, they seek to be a part of something larger than
themselves.
Those who seek to be a part of a larger-than-self organization
do so because of the pride it instills in them. They dedicate
themselves to the training and discipline that is necessary to meet
the standards of their cohorts. They work and train when they’re
off duty, running on their own time, shooting at public ranges and
building the kind of tight-knit teams that can function together
quickly and reflexively. Like the military, by that kind of “muscle
memory” teamwork, Secret Service agents do what they’re sworn to
do, whether it’s thinking about an investigation or throwing
themselves over a president to take a bullet.
And in those off-duty times, duty is ever-present. Yes,
character is part of it. Men of character don’t carouse with
prostitutes wherever they find themselves, they don’t take illicit
drugs or hit the booze to an extent that they can’t be at 100%
alertness and strength to do their jobs when they report for duty
— that word again — the following day.
The sense of duty — a deep commitment — isn’t something a
person who is dedicated to their purpose can abandon. It’s
ingrained in body and soul, a habit and creed. When people abandon
it with malice aforethought, as the suspects in the Cartagena
incident apparently did by planning the big party in advance, that
act bespeaks of an abandonment of duty that runs too deep for the
agency to function. The fact that two Secret Service supervisors
are among them tells me that the problem is not something that can
be solved by firing a few people. And, if you believe the U.S.
News and World Report
study of the Secret Service from a decade ago, these problems
have been building for too long without anyone taking them on.
The investigation of the Cartagena incident continues, and there
are reports that other agents will be fired or retired. Those
involved shouldn’t be retired: if accountability has any meaning at
all, they should be fired for cause, deprived of their retirements,
and cast out as the misfits they are. When that’s over, Secret
Service Director Mark Sullivan may have to go.
We don’t — thankfully — know the daily inner workings of the
Secret Service, nor should we. We don’t know if its culture has
been so damaged that its history of valor and skill has been
betrayed completely. I doubt that is the case. But from the obvious
failure in Colombia we can see one problem and a solution to
it.
One thing we can deduce from the facts we have is that the
system of peer pressure, which supports the sense of duty in all
within the group, has apparently failed in the Secret Service. Like
the military, its people train, practice, and work as a team and
it’s the team members who work hard to train to satisfy each other
as much as to satisfy the training regs. It’s a matter of pride and
sense of duty. If the team feels no need to discipline itself, the
sense of duty fails. Without that sense, that common purpose, the
Secret Service becomes nothing more than the GSA.
The solution will be found among the youngest and the oldest of
the Secret Service cadres. The director, whether it is Sullivan or
his successor, needs to go among them himself, taking the time to
find a few dozen who not only have the strongest sense of duty but
the leadership skills to re-instill it across the agency. That’s
the hard part.
The easy part will be for those leaders to take a mandate from
the director and restore a culture of duty, honor, and country that
must predominate agents’ thinking. The damage done by the Cartagena
incident will be deeply felt by every agent worth his salt. The
team the director selects will be able to spot the remaining bad
apples, and there will be some who have to be sent packing. For the
others, a restoration of pride and purpose will come quickly and
will last as long as every agent takes it as his personal
responsibility to have a sense of duty as his — and his fellow
agents’ — purpose in life.
