It's no secret that the Secret Service has had a few public-relations problems over the past few years.
Not the least of which was a man who scaled the White House fence and made it all the way inside the home of the American president and his family.
There have been a lot of solutions floated — better training, improved schedules for overworked agents, even a higher fence.
Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy has another idea — an $8 million replica White House complete with fountains, guard booths, even plants.
"We don't have, on that parking lot, the bushes. We don't have the fountains. We don't get a realistic look at the White House."
"Right now, we train on a parking lot, basically," Clancy, who has officially been director of the agency for about a month, told members of Congress during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. "We put up a makeshift fence and walk off the distance between the fence to the White House and the actual fence itself."
Secret Service wants $8M to build a replica of White House to help agents train to protect the real one (which cost $292K in 1792-1800)
— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) March 17, 2015
He added, "We don't have, on that parking lot, the bushes. We don't have the fountains. We don't get a realistic look at the White House."
The military uses models for training for things like urban warfare and special operations, something Clancy cited as a reason for building a fake White House at the agency's current training facility in suburban Maryland.
![A business tycoon in Iraq modeled his home after the White House.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/5206b93/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2998x2248+0+0/resize/880x660!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2015%2F03%2F18%2Fkurdishwhitehouse-05214f2355f7a6456c35ef4d386c50933121bb7d.jpg)
It wouldn't be the first replica White House built. Aside from what has been done on Hollywood movie sets over the years, NPR's Leila Fadel reported in November on a private home in Iraq under construction and modeled after the first family's house.
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