House lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to pull the Secret Service out of the Department of Homeland Security and place it directly under White House oversight, citing repeated failures that allowed three assassination attempts on President Donald Trump.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) and Russell Fry (R-SC) unveiled the bipartisan measure as part of a broader DHS reform package. The bill would make the Secret Service a direct report to the White House, remove FEMA from DHS and elevate it to a standalone cabinet-level agency, and transfer the TSA to the Department of Transportation.
“In a time where political attacks are becoming increasingly rampant, the Secret Service should be able to focus solely on its mission of protecting top U.S. officials, not dealing with bureaucratic tape that ultimately serves as a distraction to keeping the president safe,” Fry said in a statement.
The push for reform follows a string of high-profile security failures. The first attempt against Trump came at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally in 2024. A second came later that year. A third occurred in April 2026 at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where a gunman was subdued by Secret Service agents as they evacuated the president.
Moskowitz, who was present at the correspondents’ dinner, served on the congressional task force that investigated the Butler attack. He said that experience convinced him the Secret Service was trapped inside a bureaucracy too large and too slow to support the agency’s mission.
“Going to Butler, talking to Secret Service, is when I realized, well, the Secret Service is suffering the same problems that FEMA is suffering,” Moskowitz said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “Because they were such a small agency, they couldn’t get the resources they needed. They couldn’t get decisions being made.”
“These pieces of legislation would streamline all three of those agencies,” Moskowitz added. “It would cut a lot of the bureaucracy we’re getting at DHS.”
The reform push comes after DHS endured a record 76-day funding lapse that ended in late April. During the shutdown, more than 1,000 TSA agents quit, causing long security lines at major airports and widespread flight disruptions.
