Rep. Ritchie Torres, New York Democrat, on Tuesday introduced a pair of bills that would shift the role of the Secret Service in an attempt to better protect presidents and other political leaders from assassination attempts.

The lawmaker’s push comes a month after Thomas Matthew Crooks’ failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, which killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, opened up the Secret Service to heavy scrutiny for security failures.

Mr. Torres’ bills transfer financial crime investigation authority and powers from the Secret Service to the Treasury Department, and require that the Secret Service set a 500-yard minimum perimeter at public events in order to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania.

Anthony Guglielmi, spokesperson for the Secret Service, said that the agency does not comment on pending legislation. The Washington Times has reached out to the Treasury Department for comment.

The lawmaker’s “Focus on Protection Act” would orient the Secret Service to a “core mission of protecting the President, Vice President, their families, visiting heads of state, and Presidential candidates, thereby enhancing national security,” according to the bill’s text.

“It seems to me that it should be exclusively focused on presidential protection, and we need legislation that moves financial law enforcement from the Secret Service to the Treasury Department — precisely where it belongs,” Mr. Torres said in a statement.

“We should ask ourselves a simple question: do you want the Director of the Secret Service thinking about the protection of a president 100% of the time, or only 50% of the time? I prefer 100% of the time,” he said.

That bill would shift the power to investigate counterfeiting, financial fraud and cybercrime against the country’s financial systems to the Treasury.

It would also send the Secret Service personnel that investigate financial crimes and all of the “assets, contracts, property, and records associated” with financial crime investigations to the Treasury Department.

In his measure, Mr. Torres argued that transferring the investigative power would be a good fit because the Treasury Department has the “expertise and resources” to take up the responsibility from the Secret Service.

While Mr. Torres’ bill is in direct response to the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, it also is another chapter in a decadeslong fight over the Secret Service’s bureaucratic position.

For the Secret Service’s first 140 years, it operated under the Treasury Department because its original focus was investigating counterfeiting and other financial crimes.

It acquired the role of protecting presidents and presidential candidates in 1901, but continued to perform that and other official-protection tasks under Treasury auspices for more than a century. ##