A group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers has introduced legislation to remove the U.S. Secret Service from the Department of Homeland Security and re-establish it as an independent agency, a move driven by two assassination attempts against President Trump and a string of security failures that critics say DHS bureaucracy made worse.

The bill, introduced in both the House and Senate, reflects a rare point of bipartisan agreement: the agency charged with protecting the president cannot keep operating under a sprawling department that has diluted its mission and starved it of resources. The question now is whether Congress will act on that consensus or let it fade, as it has before.

What the legislation would do

Fox News reported that the bipartisan push is being led in the Senate by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and in the House by Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. The legislation would extract the Secret Service from DHS entirely and restore its status as a standalone federal agency, with the director reporting directly to the president.

Sen. Scott framed the stakes in blunt terms. He said the Secret Service "failed to protect President Trump not once but twice" and argued the agency "cannot do its job buried under the bureaucracy of DHS."

"After two assassination attempts on President Trump and countless security failures, it is clear the Secret Service cannot do its job buried under the bureaucracy of DHS."

Scott added that the bill would ensure the Secret Service director reports directly to the president, giving the agency "the autonomy and accountability it needs to fulfill its critical mission."

Democrats join the call

Sen. Blumenthal, not typically an ally of the Trump administration on security matters, offered his own pointed assessment. He said the Secret Service has been "hamstrung by its placement within DHS" and called for restoring the agency to standalone status so it can "prioritize its protective mission without bureaucratic interference."

On the House side, Rep. Torres warned that keeping the Secret Service inside DHS "dilutes its focus and weakens its ability to protect our nation's leaders." Rep. Lawler echoed the point, saying the agency "must be empowered to operate with the independence and focus that its mission demands."

The bipartisan nature of the effort is notable. Lawmakers from both parties are effectively conceding that folding the Secret Service into DHS after September 11, 2001, created structural problems that persist more than two decades later. The agency was placed under DHS when the department was created in 2003.

A decade of warnings ignored

The current push did not materialize out of nowhere. Just The News reported that a 2015 House Oversight probe, led by then-Rep. Jason Chaffetz, reviewed more than 100 security incidents and concluded the Secret Service was "an agency in crisis." That investigation recommended fixing staffing shortages, improving security-clearance screening and communications, and even considered splitting the agency's protective mission from its financial-crimes investigations.

Ten years later, Chaffetz says nothing changed.

"There's six key components that I recommended fixing, but 10 years gone by, and quite honestly, nothing has changed."

Chaffetz also delivered a damning indictment of the agency's accountability culture. "Nobody was fired. A president was shot," he said, referring to the lack of consequences following the assassination attempts against Trump. The same staffing shortages in counter-sniper teams and the same communication failures that plagued the agency a decade ago are still being cited as contributing factors in recent security breakdowns.

That pattern of institutional inertia is familiar to anyone watching federal law enforcement in Washington. Thirteen D.C. police officers were recently suspended amid probes into alleged crime-statistics fraud, a reminder that accountability gaps in the capital's security apparatus extend well beyond a single agency.

The assassination attempts that forced the issue

The legislative effort traces directly to two assassination attempts on President Trump. Both incidents exposed operational gaps that critics say a DHS-subordinate agency was structurally unable to prevent. The failures ranged from inadequate advance security planning to breakdowns in real-time communication between protective details and local law enforcement.

Security threats around Trump properties and the White House have continued to surface. Earlier this year, Secret Service agents shot an armed man near the White House during a business summit, triggering a lockdown of the executive complex. Separately, an armed man wearing body armor was arrested after firing near a Trump golf course in Los Angeles, underscoring the persistent threat environment surrounding the president and his properties.

These incidents have only sharpened the argument that the Secret Service needs a clearer chain of command and dedicated resources, not competition for budget dollars inside a department that also oversees immigration enforcement, FEMA, and cybersecurity.

The structural argument

Before 2003, the Secret Service operated as an independent agency under the Treasury Department. Its absorption into DHS was part of the post-9/11 reorganization that consolidated 22 federal agencies under one roof. Supporters of that merger argued it would improve coordination. Critics now say it did the opposite for the Secret Service, burying a focused protective agency inside a department with vastly different priorities.

The bill's sponsors argue that independence would restore direct presidential oversight and eliminate layers of bureaucratic approval that slow decision-making during fast-moving threats. The director would answer to the president, not to a DHS secretary juggling dozens of competing missions.

The broader political environment around federal agencies and the Trump White House adds another dimension. Revelations about FBI subpoenas targeting Trump allies' phone records have fueled conservative distrust of how federal agencies interact with the executive branch, making the case for a Secret Service that reports directly to the president resonate even more strongly on the right.

What comes next

The bill faces the usual legislative gauntlet: committee markups, floor votes, and the ever-present risk that bipartisan energy dissipates once the news cycle moves on. The 2015 Chaffetz report produced recommendations. It did not produce lasting reform. Lawmakers on both sides will need to explain why this time should be different.

Investigators and congressional overseers will also need to determine whether the agency's failures stemmed primarily from its DHS placement or from deeper cultural and leadership problems that would follow it into any organizational structure. Independence alone does not guarantee competence, and the agency's track record of avoiding accountability for security lapses suggests the rot may run deeper than an org chart.

Still, the bipartisan coalition behind this bill is broader and more vocal than anything that emerged after the 2015 review. Two assassination attempts against a sitting president tend to concentrate the mind in ways that a congressional report gathering dust on a shelf cannot.

When a president gets shot and nobody gets fired, the system is not just broken. It is telling you, loudly, that it does not intend to fix itself.