Radio Daze for the Secret Service

Nextel phone sales teams take note: The U.S. Secret Service might be interested in your chirping radios. That's because the agency charged with protecting the president has a big radio issue. Its radios are having an ever increasing problem talking to the White House radios. "We still are able to communicate," Mark Sullivan, Secret Service director, assures us. "Right now we are making it work, [but] there's a gap, and that gap is going to get wider." At issue: The White House Communications Agency, which runs West Wing radios, has upgraded its system to be Internet based while the Secret Service has not. The fix: some $54 million to play catch-up. Still, Sullivan isn't asking for money from Congress until 2010, prompting some members to consider cutting an earlier check to the agency.