Congress
A retiring chief strains to keep the Capitol Police above the partisan fray
Thomas Manger inherited a force in crisis when he became chief of the U.S. Capitol Police four years ago. He’s now leaving a force under a microscope.
The 70-year-old law enforcement veteran came out of retirement just months after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — tasked with stabilizing a department whose officers had been physically and emotionally battered and whose protective mission had suddenly grown immensely more complicated.
But that was only the beginning of challenge for Manger, who soon found himself holding one of the most politicized jobs in all of policing. Within months, an alternative narrative about Jan. 6 took hold on the right, and with many of its proponents now in power in Washington — including President Donald Trump — he has had to strike a careful balance between standing up for his officers and heeding the lawmakers who oversee and fund his department.
“I don’t think it’s wise or necessary or useful to try and convince members of Congress what to think,” Manger said. “I think you make the compelling argument about what the Capitol Police need, about what the Capitol Police require to do their jobs and allow them to make a decision.”
That’s not to say Manger has been silent. He has spoken out at key junctures, criticizing Trump’s blanket pardons of Jan. 6 offenders and, just last week, the Justice Department’s decision to move toward a $5 million settlement with the family of Ashli Babbit — the Jan. 6 rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer while trying to storm a room off the House floor.
But in a wide-ranging interview Tuesday — amid his last week on the job before retiring for good — Manger said it wasn’t productive for the embattled force’s chief to be snarled in political fights on Blue Light News, or in the larger war over the memory of the Capitol insurrection.
While Manger has felt compelled to speak up about situations that directly affect his officers, he has taken pains to stay out of other battles. He again called the pardons “an absolute slap in the face to police officers, frankly, all over this country” Tuesday, for instance, but refused to weigh in on the fate of a bronze plaque commemorating the officers who responded to the riot.
Congress ordered the fabrication of the memorial and its installation “at a permanent location on the western front of the United States Capitol” in March 2022. The plaque was cast, inscribed with “THEIR HEROISM WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN,” but after Republicans won the House majority the following November, it was put into storage in the Capitol basement.
Calling it a “very political issue,” Manger said he has not spoken to Republican congressional leaders about the plaque and declined to call for it to be installed. He said he had not seen the actual memorial, just a photograph.
“I hope they will find some middle ground,” he said. “There’s not a lot of memorials that are attached to the Capitol building, but there are certainly a lot of informational pedestals where you have little historical briefings around the campus.”
The tap dance reflects the enormous challenges of managing a department that is ultimately responsible to a web of overlapping overseers. There’s the three-member Capitol Police Board, four oversight committees and senior congressional leaders themselves — all of whom have influence over the department and how it operates.
Manger — who previously led the departments in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia — said dealing with the menagerie of Capitol Hill power centers was “very different” from reporting to a single elected executive and “very, very challenging.”
That, he said, has required a focus on the future of the Capitol Police and securing what the department needs to keep lawmakers, tourists and staff safe. It’s also a situation that will hang over whoever replaces Manger as chief.
“If they pick someone from the inside, they’re going to know what our mission is,” Manger said. “They’ll have that — that’s good. If they pick somebody from the outside, they’re going to have to learn about our mission, the uniqueness of it, but the structure of oversight as well, and there is a learning curve there.”
An even bigger challenge for the force, however, has been keeping up with a rising tide of threats against lawmakers. The department reported more than 9,400 in 2024, and a good number of those threats were deemed credible enough to require temporary protective details for rank-and-file lawmakers who otherwise would not be entitled to them.
That has stretched resources thin, Manger said: “We’re always robbing Peter to pay Paul to put that together. We should have the staffing to do those kinds of details.”
Manger recently made his final budget requests to Congress, asking lawmakers for $967.8 million for fiscal 2026, a 22 percent boost over the current funding level which was set in fiscal 2024. He acknowledged in hearings with appropriators that for his department’s size — about 2,300 sworn officers and civilians — a budget approaching a billion dollars is enormous. He stressed the sweeping intelligence, security and nationwide coordination mandate of the Capitol Police.
Both the Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to rein in federal spending, and lawmakers tasked with spending are expected to begin writing their bills in the coming weeks. The outgoing chief warned against continuing to keep funding flat for the department he’s set to exit long before any spending deal is reached.
“It would impact our ability to address the growing number of threats against a member of Congress,” Manger said. “We’d just be crossing our fingers and saying, ‘Well, hope nothing happens,’ because there’s more that we think we can do if we had the resources.”
The job of choosing Manger’s replacement will fall to the Capitol Police Board, comprised of House Sergeant-at-Arms William McFarland, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Jennifer Hemingway and Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin. Top congressional leaders choose those officials and are expected to have some influence in the pick.
Manger said that anyone coming in after him has to know that the job has a much different mandate and set of responsibilities than a municipal police department. He said he would be available as a sounding board but was looking forward to retirement — some consulting work, maybe, and finally fixing the fence in his yard.
“One of the things that I really, truly want to get away from is the aggravations of being a police chief,” he said. “So whatever I do, it’s going to be something I want to do.”
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee said he’s not willing to “accept bad results” as a tradeoff for the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence — a direct rebuttal to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“As someone who practiced health care for 28 years, I’m never willing to accept bad results. I think we just need to do our best,” Rep. G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters Monday.
He was responding to Altman’s comments to Decoded by Blue Light News that people “should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Pressed further on whether he agreed with Altman’s premise, Thompson replied, “No, I think we have to work harder to prevent any bad things from happening.”
Altman’s comments come in the wake of increased panic over the risks of catastrophic destruction from AI, with many industry leaders and experts arguing that guardrails are needed on the technology to prevent it from spinning out of human control.
Pressure is building on Congress to regulate the rapidly-advancing technology, but lawmakers are divided over whether the AI industry needs federal regulation or if it’s capable of governing itself.
The executives of major AI labs and tech companies gathered at the White House last week to discuss solutions with President Donald Trump, who believes overregulating AI will have national security repercussions. The group ended up signing a “morally binding” AI accord that critics say won’t do enough to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Thompson noted Monday he believes that AI will bring “tremendous solutions,” specifically in regards to finding cures for health issues like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But he also said AI has to be led with “principle” — comparing it to how he addressed digital assets in a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, which he worked on as chair of the Agriculture Committee.
“The first principle is ‘do no harm.’ So we need to protect consumers, and that means, I think, building some guardrails — some guidelines — to do that,” Thompson said. He added that the second principle is to “foster innovation.”
“I think AI has a lot to do with that,” he added. “I don’t think AI works without RI: Real Intelligence.”
LE SUEUR, Minnesota — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is no “consensus” yet on advancing a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time even as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Republicans to pass it.
Thune addressed the matter in a Monday interview after Trump used his Truth Social account multiple times over the weekend to rail against the legislation, known as the Sunshine Protection Act — going so far as to post the personal cell phone number of one of its GOP opponents, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“The president feels strongly on it like he does a lot of issues,” he said. “It’s something we’re having conversations about but there’s no clear path forward or consensus on it yet.”
While Trump singled out Cotton for scrutiny, Thune made clear the opposition to the permanent daylight saving time proposal — which would lead to very late winter sunrises in some parts of the country — ran deeper than one senator.
Cotton has publicly voiced opposition to the proposal for year, citing, among other things, the fact that children in his state would be going to school in the dark for part of the year.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voiced similar objections Monday to reporters in the Capitol, saying he was mindful of “safety concerns in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus in very early hours.”
Thune, who spoke during a campaign swing in Minnesota with GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya, has himself opposed previous daylight saving bills. He said Monday that “a lot of it depends on where you are in the country” and that “your geography probably has as much to do with your position on that as anything.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has aligned himself closely with Trump, is among the lawmakers who have been pushing to get the bill through the Senate. He recently told POLITICO, “I’m going to make sure it gets passed this year.”
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Democrats have pulled back some of their ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, days after the top Senate Republican super PAC paused its future spending in the state.
WinSenate, a group affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, has removed roughly $1.1 million in North Carolina ad buys this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The group still has roughly $18.8 million in future reservations through Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing this race through to victory, and will continue to make spending decisions based on how to best build a strong Senate majority,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.
The move, combined with the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund’s decision to pause future spending, are a signal that both parties are shifting resources amid an ever-expanding Senate map. Democrats are increasingly confident in their North Carolina Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, as he continues to hold a sizable lead in public polling over Republican Michael Whatley — but some privately say states like Michigan and New Hampshire need more resources.
Meanwhile, multiple Republican groups, not just SLF, have retreated from the state in recent weeks, effectively deciding that it’s no longer worth the money to boost Whatley’s campaign.
The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action left North Carolina off its $22 million list of future spending across key Senate contests, and Old North Action removed $6.5 million in ad reservations last month.
The Cooper campaign, however, is still treating the race as competitive, pointing to North Carolina’s closely divided electorate and the fact that President Donald Trump won the state in each of the past three presidential elections.
“North Carolina is a truly 50/50 state and Democrats haven’t won a US Senate race in 18 years. We can’t take anything for granted or our eye off the ball,” said Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to the Cooper campaign. “DC is broken and we’re going to continue to run this race like we’re ten points down to ensure North Carolinians get the change they desperately need.”
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