A Florida Democrat and a South Carolina Republican introduced legislation this week to yank the U.S. Secret Service out of the Department of Homeland Security and transfer it directly to the Executive Office of the President, a structural overhaul driven by repeated threats to President Trump's life and a growing bipartisan consensus that DHS has become too bloated to keep its own agencies on mission.
Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Russell Fry (R-S.C.) are co-leading the bill, first reported by The Hill, which would sever the Secret Service's organizational ties to DHS and make the agency a direct report to the White House. The proposal lands after a string of security failures that have shaken confidence in the federal government's ability to protect the commander-in-chief.
The Secret Service transfer is the centerpiece of a broader package. Moskowitz on Thursday also announced bipartisan-backed bills to make FEMA an independent, Cabinet-level agency and to move the Transportation Security Administration from DHS to the Department of Transportation.
The bill's sponsors did not have to reach far for justification. President Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024, one during a July campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, and another in September at his golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. More recently, federal prosecutors alleged that Trump and his administration were the target at an attack during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where a Secret Service agent was shot in his bulletproof vest but escaped injury.
Fry pointed directly to the rising threat environment in a statement Thursday:
"In a time where political attacks are becoming more and more 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."
That framing, the Secret Service hamstrung by bureaucracy rather than freed to do its job, runs through every statement the sponsors released. It is a charge that carries weight precisely because it comes from both sides of the aisle.
Fox News reported that Moskowitz said his experience on the congressional task force investigating the Butler assassination attempt convinced him the Secret Service was hindered by the same bureaucratic problems afflicting other DHS agencies. He described the most recent assassination scare as reinforcing the need to make the agency directly accountable to the president and to provide agents with more resources, not fewer.
Moskowitz's diagnosis of DHS is blunt and, frankly, hard to argue with on the merits. The department was stitched together after September 11, 2001, from a patchwork of agencies with wildly different missions, border enforcement, disaster relief, airport screening, presidential protection, immigration courts, and more. Over two decades, the seams have shown.
Moskowitz put it plainly Thursday:
"DHS has simply grown too big and too vulnerable to political dysfunction. Let's be clear: when a department becomes this massive, the mission gets lost."
He went further, laying out the case for each proposed transfer in a single sweep:
"Secret Service needs help and under the current DHS bureaucracy, that reform is never going to happen. FEMA needs to be able to move faster when disaster strikes, and it cannot do that when it is buried inside a massive bureaucracy. And airport security should be aligned with the same FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] that governs our skies."
That last point, aligning TSA with the FAA, has a certain common-sense logic that Washington rarely manages to act on. TSA was moved under DHS in 2003. Before that, airport security answered to the Transportation Department. The proposed bill would simply reverse the move.
The political dysfunction Moskowitz referenced is not abstract. DHS endured a record-breaking funding lapse that left agencies across the department in limbo. Trump eventually signed a bill to fund most DHS agencies, but the legislation excluded Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, agencies previously funded under the president's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That funding fight was itself the product of weeks of partisan trench warfare. The Senate stripped ICE funding from a DHS spending bill after a prolonged two-month Democrat blockade, and House Republicans demanded a standalone ICE funding measure before they would vote on the Senate's version.
When essential agencies like the Secret Service, FEMA, and TSA get caught in the crossfire of immigration-spending disputes, the consequences are not theoretical. TSA screeners were among the federal employees left wondering about their paychecks. Secret Service agents, the same people expected to step between a president and a bullet, were swept up in a funding standoff that had nothing to do with presidential protection.
The Secret Service bill is the headline, but the companion measures deserve attention. The FEMA Independence Act, co-led by Moskowitz and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), would elevate FEMA to a Cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the president. The pair previously introduced the bill last fall, designated as House bill 4669.
Donalds, who is running for governor of Florida, framed the proposal in terms any disaster-weary Floridian would recognize:
"When disaster strikes, quick and effective action must be the standard, not the exception. It is imperative that the bureaucratic labyrinth of FEMA is simplified and streamlined to directly report to the President of the United States to better serve our citizens in their hour of need."
The argument is straightforward. FEMA's response times and accountability suffer when the agency must route decisions through DHS leadership before reaching the Oval Office. Stripping out that middle layer could speed response and sharpen accountability, or at least that is the theory the bill's sponsors are putting forward.
Meanwhile, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) is co-leading the Transportation Security Administration Transfer Act of 2026, which would return TSA to the Transportation Department. Burchett's rationale focused on the funding vulnerability created by TSA's current home inside DHS.
"The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been used as pawns during recent government shutdowns because it is controlled by the Department of Homeland Security. Since the Department of Transportation already oversees air travel in the United States, it should also be responsible for overseeing the personnel who provide its security."
Burchett's point lands squarely. Travelers and TSA workers alike have paid the price every time Congress turns DHS funding into a political weapon. Moving TSA out of the blast radius of immigration-spending fights would not solve every problem, but it would remove one obvious source of unnecessary disruption.
Step back and look at what these bills collectively propose: pulling the Secret Service, FEMA, and TSA out of DHS. That is three of the department's most publicly visible agencies. If all three bills passed, DHS would be left as primarily a border-security and immigration-enforcement apparatus, which, in fairness, may be closer to what the department should have been from the start.
The broader DHS funding saga this year illustrated the problem in real time. When House Republicans passed a full DHS funding bill, Democrats dug in against ICE and Border Patrol money. The resulting standoff held every other DHS agency hostage to an immigration fight. Secret Service agents, FEMA planners, and TSA screeners became collateral damage in a political dispute over border enforcement.
That is exactly the dynamic Moskowitz and Fry want to break. Whether you agree with their specific remedy or not, the diagnosis is sound: bundling presidential protection, disaster response, and airport security under the same roof as immigration enforcement creates a single point of political failure.
Fry, the Republican co-lead, framed the Secret Service transfer in terms of direct accountability:
"Moving the Secret Service to the White House allows the organization to uphold its mission while simultaneously giving them more direct accountability to the President of the United States."
That line matters. The Secret Service's mission is protecting the president. Making the agency answer directly to the person it protects, rather than to a DHS secretary juggling two dozen other priorities, is not a radical idea. It is an obvious one.
The bills face the usual Washington headwinds. Restructuring a Cabinet department is heavy legislative lifting, and DHS has powerful institutional defenders on Capitol Hill. The formal bill numbers, committee referrals, and markup schedules for the new 2026 proposals have not yet been detailed publicly.
There is also the question of where, exactly, the Secret Service would sit within the Executive Office of the President. The EOP is a sprawling entity in its own right, and the organizational specifics matter for budget authority, hiring, and operational independence. The bill text has been released, but those structural details have not been widely discussed.
DHS itself has not publicly responded to the proposals. Nor has the White House weighed in on whether the administration supports moving the Secret Service under its direct roof. The agency that recently threatened to pull customs officers from California airports over sanctuary-city defiance may not welcome a legislative effort to carve away three of its highest-profile components.
Still, the bipartisan nature of these proposals gives them a credibility that single-party messaging bills rarely earn. Moskowitz is a Democrat. Fry, Donalds, and Burchett are Republicans. They are not agreeing on immigration or spending levels. They are agreeing that DHS is too big, too tangled, and too politically exposed to run agencies whose missions demand speed, focus, and independence from partisan budget fights.
When a department's own funding battles put the president's protective detail at risk, the structure is the problem. These lawmakers, at least, are willing to say so, and to file the paperwork to fix it.