After two years on the Clinton detail based at the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, Johnson wanted to transfer back to California, where she grew up.
“All of a sudden, they said they can’t transfer anyone out of New York,” she says. “They said they have no one to replace me. At the same time, they’re sending out an email that says anyone, regardless of where you are in your career track, if you would like to go to Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco, raise your hand and you’re there. So I write the little memo and I raise my hand. I jump up and down, and they tell me, ‘Oh, well, we can’t replace you. So you can’t go.’”
At the same time, Johnson says, friends in the Los Angeles office were sending her copies of emails they were receiving from management saying they had to leave Los Angeles to go to protective details.
“A year later when I went to my management, they said, ‘Oh, well, L.A.’s full. How about the New York field office?’” she says.
When the Secret Service finally agreed to transfer her to Los Angeles after three years in New York, “I find out that we were eleven bodies short in L.A. So how did we go from being full to being eleven bodies short in four months?”
In other cases, the Secret Service disregards situations where a spouse has a job in another city. Johnson and others describe one situation where an agent based in Los Angeles began dating a doctor in Hawaii. Eventually, they married, and the agent put in for a transfer to Hawaii, where his wife had an established medical practice.
“We have an office in Hawaii, so it’s easier for him to transfer than it is for her,” Johnson says. “But the management we had in L.A. at the time had no juice. He was told he couldn’t be transferred to Hawaii. He quit because he said his marriage was more important.”
About a month later, after he moved to Hawaii, he applied to return to the Secret Service. The head of the Hawaii office, who had juice, rehired him.
“Here you’re being told you can’t transfer, and the bottom line was, it was all about who your boss is,” Johnson says.
In another case, agent Dan Klish was issued orders to transfer to Los Angeles. His wife’s career as a radiation oncologist made it difficult for her to find a position there. Finally, she obtained a job near Denver. Klish asked for a transfer to Denver or Cheyenne and offered to pay for the move himself. That would have saved the government about seventy-five thousand dollars in moving costs. The transfer was denied. For more than two years, they lived apart, and the agent flew to Denver once or twice a month to see his wife and young daughter.
During that time, the service asked for volunteers to transfer to Denver. Approximately ten other agents were transferred to Denver, some with less seniority, at a cost to the government of seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars for each move.
“If the opening isn’t available at that moment, then the service can say, ‘Oh, sorry, that office is overstaffed. Here are your only options,’” Klish says. “Then, sure enough, while you’re still on orders to move somewhere else but haven’t moved yet, an opening in a city that would work for you comes out, and you can’t even put in for it because you’re already on orders to go elsewhere. Later, after you’ve moved, they transfer several others to that city. There is a strong bond among agents, but unless you have the right connections, the Secret Service doesn’t care about the agents.”
After eight years with the Secret Services, Klish finally quit to join another federal agency in Colorado.
Joel Mullen, an agent who was based in Washington, D.C., is married to a navy lawyer. When the navy gave her orders to transfer to San Diego, Mullen asked to transfer to the Secret Service field office there, saying the navy would pay the cost. After initially approving the transfer, headquarters blocked it, even though San Diego had openings. Mullen and his wife had started building a home near San Diego. The Secret Service told Mullen to transfer to the Los Angeles office instead.
“I commuted ninety-six miles one way from my door to the office,” Mullen says. “I did that for fourteen months. Then I left and went with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”
Besides losing an agent with ten years’ experience, the Secret Service wound up paying out $240,000 for the transfer to cover Mullen’s costs, including the decline in the value of his house in the Washington area.
Nor does the agency have an open process for listing anticipated vacancies and agents’ preferences for transfers. All are kept secret. If an agent has “juice,” he or she is bumped ahead of others.
In contrast, the FBI, which has 12,500 agents, maintains online lists of requested transfers to each field office so that agents can see who is ahead of them. FBI agents say connections play no role in transfers. Because of the open lists, if the FBI did engage in such under-the-table preferential treatment, the agents would know it.
That the Secret Service’s computer program for listing transfer preferences and bidding on promotions is an antiquated DOS-based program symbolizes how much the Secret Service cares about agents’ wishes.
Resignations before retirement have increased substantially in recent years. In all, the Secret Service has 3,404 special agents. More than half their man-hours are devoted to protection of the president and other national leaders, as well as visiting foreign dignitaries. Attrition rates are increasing. As the trend accelerated, the Secret Service declined to provide full yearly figures, but the rate is roughly 5 percent a year. Turnover rates are as high as 12 percent a year in the Uniformed Division, which has 1,288 officers. More alarming, agents who have been in the service ten years say a third to half of the agents who were in their initial training class have left.
“These people who are leaving are very qualified agents who are doing a really good job and are held in high esteem,” an agent says. “That’s what really hurts us.”
The Secret Service asked an analyst then based in Washington to study the problem of retention and the costs associated with agent turnover. She found it was an increasingly serious problem. The incremental cost to the government of training a new agent is eighty thousand dollars for the agent’s salary and the cost of equipment and travel. That excludes the fixed costs of the training facilities and the salaries of instructors.
“The higher-ups basically dismissed her findings, saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have any kind of retention problem,’” says a current agent. “They didn’t want to hear it.”
Johnson, who is now a real estate investor, describes trying to raise the issue during her exit interview.
“The supervisor who was giving me the exit interview was literally saying, ‘Tell me if there are any problems we should know about’ as he was starting to escort me out the door,” Johnson says. “I said, ‘Well, yes, I’m sure you hear this a lot,’ and I began to lay out examples of unnecessary burdens imposed on agents.”
The supervisor became defensive.
“He started going on about how the military does more, and there are civilians who sacrifice more than we do in the service,” she says. “He couldn’t even listen to what I had to say.”
In a rare move, an agent raised the issue at a meeting of Secret Service officials at the agency’s Washington field office.
“You’ve got a bunch of Generation X agents,” he said. “We’re concerned about our families; we’re concerned about our wives and our kids. Something has to change.”
Shortly after that, the agent resigned.
In recent years, agents say a dismissive, insular culture and a disregard for the need to retain agents have remained constant.
“Our leadership is in absolute denial that there’s a problem,” an agent says. “They don’t want to do anything to fix it.”