WASHINGTON — President Trump has selected Randolph D. Alles, a retired Marine Corps general and acting deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, to lead the Secret Service, the White House said Tuesday.
Alles, who retired from the Marines as a two-star general in 2011, would be the first Secret Service director in at least a century not to have served among the agency’s ranks.
The appointment comes as the storied law enforcement body is straining to keep up with rapid growth in the number of people it protects, and to address festering personnel deficiencies that predate the Trump administration.
Alles, who goes by Tex, will be charged with rebuilding its ranks, which have been racked by high attrition and low morale. But he is likely to face tough choices about the future of its investigative mission.
That the appointment appears to be a Secret Service outsider will most likely appease critics of the agency, who have argued in recent years that only someone from outside its culture could bring about the changes needed to set it on sure footing.
The response among the Secret Service’s fiercely loyal rank-and-file, many of whom would have preferred the elevation of an insider, is expected to be more muted.
High atop the list of challenges Alles will inherit is an internal investigation of a March 10 intrusion onto the White House grounds that critics of the agency have said raises serious concerns about the security of the Executive Mansion.
In the incident, a California man scaled a series of fences on the White House grounds and lingered there for 17 minutes before being apprehended. The agency has already fired two officers from its uniformed division who were on duty at the time, and has updated security protocols.
At the same time, the agency is scrambling to realign its resources to meet the spike in people under its watch — with the president’s world-traveling adult children responsible for in part for that increase. It is negotiating for tens of millions of dollars in supplemental funding to help offset the costs associated with that growth, and for now has diverted many agents away from the criminal and investigative work that constituted a lesser known, but significant, part of the agency’s tasks.
Alles’ larger charge, though, will be to address structural weaknesses that have shaken the confidence of some in the White House Congress. Morale among Secret Service employees has sunk lower than among those of any other federal agency, according to government surveys. That has led, in part, to an attrition rate so high that the agency has struggled to keep pace through hiring, much less increase its pool of uniformed officers and special agents.
New York Times
