The Secret Service recorded three drone incidents around its protectees between 2015 and 2021, changed no policy on civilian drone use after any of them, and never wrote down why. That is the finding of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published Thursday, which follows the paper trail forward to July 13, 2024, when Thomas Crooks flew a drone for roughly 11 minutes over the Butler, Pennsylvania rally grounds before shooting Donald Trump.

The report, GAO-26-108455, covers fiscal years 2015 through 2025. In that window the Secret Service reviewed 83 security incidents and updated its protection policies after 25 of them. For the other 58, agency policy did not require anyone to record the reasoning for leaving the rules alone. GAO’s auditors say that gap is why nobody can now explain what the agency concluded when a drone touched President Barack Obama’s motorcade in Hawaii in December 2015.

DroneXL first reported on the Butler drone a week after the shooting, when investigators disclosed that Crooks had flown a DJI aircraft on a preprogrammed path over the Farm Show grounds. Two years and one counter-drone buildout later, federal auditors have counted how many earlier warnings sat in the agency’s own files.

GAO Found Three Drone Incidents and No Record of Any Decision

The Secret Service encountered drones near protectees in December 2015, May 2016 and January 2021, according to GAO’s report. None produced a policy on civilian drone use, and the agency documented no rationale for leaving its rules unchanged after any of them. GAO calls that missing paperwork the core problem.

The first incident came on a return trip from a golf outing in Hawaii, when a civilian operator’s drone came into contact with Obama’s motorcade. The second was a drone flown about 200 feet (60 meters) over a crowd at a San Jose, California rally for then-candidate Bernie Sanders. The third was different in kind: at the January 2021 inauguration, agents spotted multiple drones shortly before Joe Biden arrived and did not immediately recognize them as U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft flying with authorization. That one did trigger an immediate change, clarifying who inside the Secret Service leads on drone countermeasures. It still produced nothing on what to do when a member of the public puts a drone over a protectee.

Secret Service officials told GAO that some incidents warranted no change because they found no operational deficiency, the mitigation worked, and nobody was hurt. That may well have been the reasoning in 2015 and 2016. Nobody can check, because the incident form had no box for it. GAO’s conclusion is blunt: “Some of the missing information has been relevant to subsequent attacks.”

Had the rationale been recorded, GAO writes, it would have surfaced in the agency’s annual incident reviews and could have shown drones recurring in security incidents before one was used in an assassination attempt.

The Butler Drone Flew for 11 Minutes Over Ground the Secret Service Never Surveyed From Above

GAO states that Crooks flew his drone for about 11 minutes over the Butler crowd, and that the flight helped him position himself to fire. Trump was wounded, two attendees were injured and one was killed. The Secret Service flew no drones over the site that day.

The agency turned down offers of drone coverage from local law enforcement the night before the rally, according to a whistleblower account relayed by Senator Josh Hawley, then asked the same partner to fly after the shots were fired. DroneXL’s analysis of the drone reconnaissance laid out how a consumer aircraft on a waypoint mission gave a 20-year-old a site survey the protective detail did not have.

The fixes since then have been hardware and authority. The Secret Service moved to boost its own drone surveillance within weeks of Butler and by mid-2025 was fielding military-grade aircraft. GAO’s earlier report on the rally, published in July 2025, recommended the agency document training requirements for its counter-drone operators and write down what its new Aviation and Air Security Division is supposed to do. This week’s report says the Department of Homeland Security agreed and has acted on some of it.

What the new report adds is that the missing ingredient in 2015 and 2016 was not a sensor or a statute. It was a sentence.

Eight of 22 Protection Policies Missed Their Four-Year Review, One Dates to 2001

Secret Service policy since March 2022 requires every protection policy to be reviewed and updated, or formally reauthorized, within four years of issuance. GAO checked 22 policies governing domestic and foreign advance planning and found eight had not been touched inside that window.

Three of the eight are specific to foreign protective advances. The oldest is the Vice Presidential Protective Division’s foreign advance policy, effective July 16, 2001. The Dignitary Protective Division’s motorcade policy dates to May 2019, and the Office of Protective Operations’ site security policy, the document governing how an advance team identifies a venue’s vulnerabilities, was last issued in May 2022. Officials told GAO they try to keep up but cannot always find people to do the drafting, and current policy assigns that job to no specific position. GAO’s second recommendation is to name one.

A 1991 Memo Still Governs Overseas Protection and Places the Secret Service Inside Treasury

The Secret Service and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service divide responsibility for protecting the President abroad, and foreign dignitaries in the United States, under a 1991 memorandum of understanding that requires an annual review. GAO found it has never been updated and does not mention drones.

The memo still describes the Secret Service as part of the Department of the Treasury, which stopped being true in March 2003. It omits protectees added by statute since, including former Vice Presidents. GAO notes that unmanned aircraft may now enter or operate in the restricted areas where protectees visit or live, and that neither agency’s current advance policies cover the joint coordination the memo was written to handle.

The two agencies do not agree on whether that matters. Secret Service officials told GAO they do not think the memo needs updating, because a presidential policy directive and existing statutes cover the roles. GAO’s auditors reviewed both and disagreed. Diplomatic Security Service officials said they had considered an update in 2022 but never engaged the Secret Service on it, and described operating under a 35-year-old memo as unacceptable. Both departments have now agreed to convene a working group.

DHS Accepted Every Recommendation and Then Argued About the Framing

GAO issued four recommendations, three to the Secret Service and one to the Secretary of State. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with all three of its own: after-action reports will record why an incident warranted no policy change, and each directorate will name someone to own policy reviews.

DHS also told GAO the report lacked context about how hard the Secret Service tries to keep policies current. GAO’s response, in the published text, is that the report provides appropriate context. Nathan Tranquilli, GAO’s acting director for homeland security and justice, told the Associated Press the drone incidents were a “compelling example” of what goes missing when the agency does not record its reasoning.

The report was requested by Representatives Bennie Thompson and Seth Magaziner, the ranking Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee and its counterterrorism subcommittee. It lands after a year in which protectees faced an alleged April 2026 assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a May 2026 shooting near Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade, and a foiled drone-and-sniper plot against the UFC event on the White House grounds in June. GAO also records that the Secret Service’s total enacted budget rose 82 percent across the audit period, from $1.84 billion in fiscal 2015 to $3.4 billion in fiscal 2025.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered the Secret Service and drones since the agency flew its own aircraft over the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in 2020, most recently the counter-drone teams on the National Mall this July 4. The fixes since Butler added hardware or authority. This report says the failure was neither.

Start with what the agency is not being accused of. Nobody at GAO says the Secret Service should have predicted Butler from a drone bumping a motorcade in Hawaii. The zero-fail mission is real, the tempo is real (7,641 protective visits in fiscal 2025 alone), and the threat picture since 2024 has gotten worse by any honest count. Reviewing an incident and deciding it needs no policy change is a legitimate outcome.

The problem is that the decision left no trace. After a drone made physical contact with the President’s motorcade, the agency filed an incident form and moved on, and today nobody can say whether the reviewers decided civilian drones were beneath policy, or planned to revisit it, or never asked the question. That is not a hardware gap. It is an institution that had three chances to notice a pattern in its own records and had built no mechanism for noticing. Secret Service officials acknowledged to GAO that recording the reasoning would show a decision was deliberate and risk-based. They conceded the point in the same paragraph GAO made it.

My read is that this report cuts against the reflex that has governed drone policy since July 2024. The Secret Service did change things inside the building, and GAO records them: a 2025 staffing policy for candidate details, a new Protective Readiness section, a February 2026 instruction to review incidents continuously. None of them require anyone to write down why an incident changed nothing. The response the public saw was aimed outward, at the aircraft and the people who fly them: new federal counter-drone money, mitigation authority for local police under the Safer Skies Act, restrictions that grounded certificated Part 107 pilots at World Cup venues who had never done anything wrong. I do not oppose protecting a president. I do object to the drone community absorbing every cost of an institutional failure while the institution’s own review process, the one thing that would have connected 2015 to 2024, went unexamined until a congressional auditor asked. The Secret Service’s budget rose 82 percent across the years its civilian drone policy stayed blank. Whatever that money bought, it did not buy a sentence on a form.

The fix DHS has agreed to is cheap, and it is the right one. It is also undated and easy to let slide once the headlines move on. GAO keeps a public tracker of open recommendations, and Recommendation 1 of GAO-26-108455 stays open until the Secret Service shows the revised incident-reporting policy exists and is in use. That is the document to ask for. Until it appears, the agency that missed three drone warnings has agreed, in writing, that it should have written things down, and has not yet written that down either.

Sources: Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-108455; Associated Press via Fortune.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.