BALTIMORE — At an installation in Laurel, nestled among government research facilities off Powder Mill Road, all U.S. Secret Service agents go through months of intensive training for their “zero-fail” mission of protecting U.S. leaders.
Although the agency’s training operations and protection strategies have long been considered top-of-the-line, there will likely be tweaks as authorities investigate the security pitfalls that led to a gunman being able to fire at former President Donald Trump, striking the Republican candidate in the ear and killing an attendee at a rally this month in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The near-assassination and a congressional grilling that followed also prompted the Secret Service’s director of almost two years, Kimberly Cheatle, to resign Tuesday.
Cheatle, who said she took “full responsibility for the security lapse,” was once the special agent in charge of the facility in Laurel, handling “all aspects of training and career development” after being appointed to lead it in 2016, according to the Secret Service’s online biography of her.
During her time as the agency’s director, Cheatle had appeared before congressional leaders and the public to champion expansions to the agency’s James J. Rowley Training Center, including plans to build a model of the White House grounds to be used for specialized training.
After completing a criminal investigation training program at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Utah, Secret Service trainees spend 18 weeks, or roughly four months, at the facility in Laurel. The training center houses “a conglomeration of” field training areas, firearms ranges, classrooms and physical training areas, said Robert McDonald, who once supervised the facility’s protected detail training and the operations section.
McDonald, who was the assistant special agent in charge of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s detail before retiring from the Secret Service in 2015, is now a criminal justice lecturer at the University of New Haven. He noted that he still talks to his classmates from his time training in Laurel nearly three decades ago.
“We’re lifelong friends; we went through ups and downs together,” he said. “Everybody’s away from their family, and you kind of become cohesive within the Secret Service family.”
The training in Laurel includes a combination of firearms training, physical drills and academic studies. McDonald described the practice as both proactive and intensive, often requiring agents, who are usually living in nearby hotels, to be on-site for 12-hour days.
Agents work on developing all the skills they might need — weapons use, driving tactics, counterfeit currency detection and various other investigative and computer expertise, as well as developing protective methodologies. Their instructors include a combination of regular and retired agents, along with specialists who are experts in their fields.
“It is very, very intensive, very physically demanding, very mentally demanding,” McDonald said. “It’s absolutely top-notch training.”
Trainees aren’t always new to the agency; the facility is also used to sharpen longtime agents’ skills during in-service and other campaign-related training.
The center itself is slated for a massive expansion, including 755,000 square feet of new facilities over the next several years. The branch lists a “defense tactical facility” — the 40-acre mock-up of the White House grounds that Cheatle had lobbied for as the agency’s director — as a high-priority project in its master plan for additions to the training center. The cost estimate section of the full master plan is redacted, though the Department of Homeland Security’s fiscal 2025 budget passed the House of Representatives last month with $75 million designated for “the initial phase” of the White House project.
The DHS paid a consultant $5.7 million last year for architecture and engineering work on the White House project, and the Secret Service requested potential contractors to provide their cost estimates by this January, according to federal spending records.
Cheatle discussed the agency’s vision for the “state-of-the-art” mock White House with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore last year while hosting the Democratic governor for a tour of the facility. She said in a statement afterward that the model would serve as a “cornerstone for the advanced training” of agents and other personnel.
She said during a rare interview with CBS News last year that agents in Laurel were still conducting White House training exercises using a field of trees surrounded by bike racks and noted that the agency had visited a model of the president’s home at filmmaker Tyler Perry’s production studio in Atlanta.
McDonald said this month’s assassination attempt will certainly prompt the Secret Service to tweak its training and protection procedures, though he believes the agents at the July 13 rally acted well, showing “incredible bravery” by moving “directly into the line of fire” to protect Trump.
Secret Service agents go through grueling training to prepare for the worst, though many never see gunshots during their careers, including McDonald, who was with the agency for 20 years. Watching the events in Butler unfold, McDonald and other agents reflected on their training, their muscle memory and “repetitive practicing for those types of things” and thought about whether they would have been able to do the same.
“All of us retired agents are going through what those agents went through,” he said. “I think you can see that those agents did respond in a positive way or a successful way based on their training.”
McDonald said that although he doesn’t think the assassination attempt will prompt sudden, sweeping changes to the Secret Service’s methodologies, it will probably cause “kind of a reset with respect to making sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed” to ensure the agency doesn’t become “complacent” about various parts of its strategies that could go wrong.
There will likely be some adjustments to protective plans, he said, as well as the agency’s supervisory signoff process for security plans. He cautioned, though, that “when chaos erupts, nothing ever goes like the playbook said it should” — as evidenced by the July 13 rally.
“The Secret Service methodologies are tried and true. It’s an agency that is one of the very best at what it does,” he said, adding that the agency, which has a “zero-fail” policy, wasn’t at its very best during the Butler rally.
“That’s why we’ve got to figure out what went wrong there,” he said.
