In my nearly 40 years in the political and public policy arenas, I’ve seen my share of well-intentioned but incredibly bad ideas coming from members of Congress. On May 7, the latest such example was provided by Representatives Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) and Russell Fry (R-SC): the Secret Service Transfer Act, which would move the Secret Service out of the Department of Homeland Security and place it directly within the Executive Office of the President (EOP)
It’s clear from their public statements that both men are motivated by a genuine concern over the inability of the Secret Service to consistently and effectively protect the current sitting president. But the historical record shows such failures are inevitable regardless of where the Secret Service has existed on the government’s organization chart.
During the century-plus the Secret Service resided within the Treasury Department, there were presidential deaths at the hands of assassins (McKinley and Kennedy) or near-death episodes (Reagan). There’s no reason to believe that moving the Secret Service somewhere else in the Executive Branch will deter future assassins from making an attempt on a president’s life, and even less reason to believe that an organizational shuffling will ensure improved Secret Service performance in presidential protection.
There is, however, ample reason to believe that if the Moskowitz-Fry proposal were to become law, it would usher in a new age of presidentially directed spying and political repression unlike any seen in the history of the Republic, but which has clear historical parallels reaching back to the Roman Empire and its Praetorian Guard.
The reason lies not in the bill’s surface rationale but in what its sponsors appear not to have considered: the Secret Service is not merely a presidential protection agency. Far from it.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 3056, the Secret Service has jurisdiction over counterfeiting, financial fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud, and computer crimes. The financial crimes mandate has been a core Secret Service function since the agency’s founding in 1865.
Move the Secret Service into the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and you move its financial crimes jurisdiction there with it. Under the current administration’s own legal framework, that distinction is not incidental — it is the ballgame.
In April, Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a 52-page opinion concluding that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional in its entirety, and that the president “need not further comply with its dictates.” The legal architecture underlying that opinion holds that the EOP is the president’s constitutionally protected domain, not a space subject to ordinary congressional regulation or oversight. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security; it can regulate DHS. The EOP is different in kind: it is where presidential authority is most plenary and congressional reach is most attenuated.
A future OLC opinion — and this OLC has demonstrated it will reach for maximal presidential authority claims — could argue that the Secret Service’s director, as an EOP officer, serves entirely at the president’s pleasure without Senate confirmation and that the president may direct Secret Service financial crimes investigative priorities as an exercise of inherent Article II supervisory authority that no statute can override. The bill, as drafted, doesn’t even require Senate confirmation for the Service’s director — making that argument easier, not harder, to sustain.
Consider what that means against the backdrop of where this administration already is.
In September, President Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, directing federal law enforcement to investigate Americans based on ideological markers — “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity” — that describe protected First Amendment activity, not criminal conduct.
The administration’s FY2027 budget request confirmed that a multi-agency NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center is now operational, drawing personnel from 10 federal agencies, specifically tasked with integrating “intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis” against its designated targets. What’s more, the administration has already named specific organizations — the Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Ford Foundation — for investigation and possible prosecution and has directed the Internal Revenue Service to treat their tax-exempt status as a live question.
That is the financial targeting apparatus already in motion. The Secret Service’s financial crimes jurisdiction is precisely the enforcement tool most relevant to it. Place the Secret Service inside the presidency under a theory of plenary presidential authority over that space, and the president gains direct, unmediated supervisory control over the agency best positioned to investigate the financial networks of his administration’s designated political enemies.
Congressman Moskowitz, to his credit, joined the April 2026 House Judiciary Democrats’ amicus brief arguing that Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms for their advocacy clients violate the First Amendment and separation of powers. He grasps, in that context, that an administration willing to weaponize executive authority against political opponents is one whose control over law enforcement cannot be expanded without consequence. Yet his proposed legislation does not reflect that same understanding.
The bill would also dramatically reduce congressional oversight that the Secret Service so plainly needs. EOP components routinely invoke executive privilege to resist congressional subpoenas and document demands. Moving an agency with documented accountability failures into the portion of the executive branch most resistant to scrutiny is not a reform — it is an immunity grant.
None of this impugns Moskowitz’s or Fry’s motives. Both men are responding to real operational Secret Service failures. But the test of institutional reform is not whether the sponsor’s intentions are honorable — it is whether the authority being transferred will be used honorably by every future occupant of the office receiving it.
Congress should not respond by moving a federal law enforcement agency with sweeping jurisdiction directly into the president’s institutional inner circle. Doing so would not solve the Secret Service’s operational problems. It would instead create the conditions for a future president to exercise direct political control over one of the federal government’s most powerful investigative tools while shielding that control from meaningful oversight.
It is a blueprint for presidential political policing.
Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute.