Who else was stunned by recent reports about the lapses by the Secret Service?  Sebastian Payne listed the “the top 10 recent Secret Service headaches” here. Dylan Matthews goes into more detail on three astounding incidents: an intruder with a knife got all the way into the East Room of the White House; President Barack Obama ended up in an elevator with a convicted criminal who was carrying a gun; and it “took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence.”

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned this week, and I agree 100 percent with Bryce Covert’s take:

Reasonable people can disagree about whether, ultimately, she deserved to lose her job or whether anyone in charge during such an incident would have to resign. But it’s probably not pure chance that Pierson, who held that position for just a year-and-a-half, was a woman. Time and again, women are put in charge only when there’s a mess, and if they can’t engineer a quick cleanup, they’re shoved out the door. The academics Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam even coined a term for this phenomenon: They call it getting pushed over the glass cliff. […]

The understaffing, for which Pierson was not responsible, could have played a significant role in the breach that led to her losing her position. Former secret service agents told the Washington Post that the incident may have been related to the severe staffing shortage in the division responsible for securing the White House. […]

As for the Secret Service, it turns out that Joseph Clancy will be Pierson’s temporary replacement, even though he was in charge of the presidential detail the night the Salahis slipped past checkpoints [in 2009].

I don’t know how much of the security lapses can be attributed to inadequate Secret Service staffing and funding levels during Obama’s presidency, and how much stem from a too-broad mission or aspects of the Secret Service training and organizational culture. For the safety and of the president and everyone around him, I hope these problems will be solved quickly. It will take a lot more than a change at the top.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.