Randolph Alles, Retired General, Is Chosen to Lead Secret Service

New York Times – by Nicholas Fandos

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 announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Alles, who retired from the Marine Corps as a two-star general in 2011, is the first Secret Service director in at least a century not to have served in 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.

Mr. Alles, who goes by Tex, will be charged with rebuilding the agency’s ranks, which have been racked by high attrition and low morale. He is also likely to face tough choices about the future of its investigative tasks, a lower-profile but longstanding aspect of its mission.

Mr. Alles’s selection appeared to appease the agency’s critics who have argued in recent years that only someone from outside its culture could bring about the kinds of changes needed to set it on sure footing. The response among the Secret Service’s 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 Mr. Alles inherits 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 it has updated security protocols.

The agency is also scrambling to realign its resources to meet the spike in people under its watch — the president’s world-traveling adult children are only a part of 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.

Mr. Alles’s larger charge, though, will be to address structural weaknesses that have shaken the confidence of some in the White House and among congressional overseers. 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.

The first step for Mr. Alles, said those who know the agency well, will be winning over its 6,500 employees, who are fiercely loyal and view their work as fundamentally different from other agencies. Assuming he can accomplish that, W. Ralph Basham, the Secret Service director under President George W. Bush, said Mr. Alles’s appointment presented the agency with a chance for a badly needed reset.

“You are always going to have questions about whether an outsider really understands the mission or what it’s like to stand a post at the White House at midnight,” Mr. Basham said. “But I am not sure that is what is really the challenge right now. I think the challenge is to win back the confidence of the American people, the White House and the Congress.”

Mr. Alles brings a mix of military, law enforcement and logistics experience to the position. Most of that experience comes from the Marine Corps, where he rose through the ranks as a pilot, aviation instructor and eventually the commanding general of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing in Iraq. As acting deputy commissioner at Customs and Border Protection, he has served as the agency’s chief operating officer, overseeing about 60,000 employees, including the United States Border Patrol.

Customs and Border Protection has a wide range of responsibilities, including securing the nation’s physical borders, screening visitors and cargo entering the country, and protecting its agricultural products from the introduction of pests and diseases.

Mr. Alles joined it in 2012 to help lead a unit responsible for all air and sea operations for the agency, including a growing unmanned aircraft program. Mr. Alles dived into the job, said R. Gil Kerlikowske, who served as the agency’s commissioner under President Barack Obama, helping to rebuild the unit’s fleet and its relationships with private organizations. Mr. Alles was so enthusiastic about the job, Mr. Kerlikowske said, that he preferred to wear flight suits to work at the agency’s Washington headquarters.

Patrick O’Carroll, a former Secret Service agent who is the executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said Mr. Alles’s homeland security experience could serve to diminish the learning curve as he studies the ins and outs of his new agency.

Mr. Alles will also benefit from a strong relationship with John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary and a fellow retired Marine Corps general, who pushed for him to get the top job. Mr. Kelly is said to have taken an intense interest in the Secret Service since the March 10 fence jumper, even walking the White House grounds himself to better understand how the lapse had occurred.

Though the Secret Service falls within the Homeland Security Department, the president, the most important person it protects, has traditionally had the final word on the agency’s top job. The position does not require Senate confirmation.

The agency’s last permanent director, Joseph P. Clancy, stepped down in early March to allow Mr. Trump his own choice of director.

The administration wasted little time in putting Mr. Alles to work; he was sworn in Tuesday afternoon in front of staff members at the agency’s headquarters shortly after the White House made the appointment official.

New York Times