In a major loss for the country, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard announced Friday her plans to resign from her post at the end of June. The former congresswoman cited her husband’s recent diagnosis of an “extremely rare form of bone cancer” as the reason for her departure.
“Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage — standing steadfast through my deployment to East Africa on a Joint Special Operations mission, multiple political campaigns, and now my service in this role. His strength and love have sustained me through every challenge,” Gabbard wrote in a letter addressed to President Trump. “I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position.”
Gabbard said she will officially depart her role as DNI on June 30. While noting the “significant progress” she and her team made at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, “advancing unprecedented transparency and restoring integrity to the intelligence community,” the Hawaii native acknowledged “there is still important work to be done.” She stated that she is “fully committed to ensuring a smooth and thorough transition over the coming weeks” so the president and his team “experience no disruption in leadership or momentum.”
“Thank you for your understanding during this deeply personal and difficult time for our family. I will remain forever grateful to you and to the American people for the profound honor of serving our nation as DNI,” Gabbard wrote.
Gabbard has been instrumental in bringing much-needed transparency to America’s intel apparatus and agencies throughout her time in the administration.
The outgoing DNI played a pivotal part in declassifying a series of documents last year that showcased how former President Obama and his intel chiefs weaponized a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to help launch the infamous Russia collusion hoax.
The unearthed records more specifically illustrated how the ICA’s central claim that the Kremlin “aspired” for Trump to win the 2016 election was based on weak and uncorroborated intelligence. They further showed how baseless allegations from the Clinton bought-and-paid-for “Steele dossier” were shoehorned into the ICA despite the objections of key intel officials.
Gabbard’s office launched a task force early in her tenure as a means of preventing such abuses by intel agencies in the future. This task force would go on to expand its efforts at restoring transparency and accountability in government to include interviewing agency whistleblowers and investigating election infrastructure vulnerabilities.
The outgoing DNI also notably used her platform to advocate for individual liberty and oppose government abuse of surveillance programs to spy on unsuspecting citizens.
While speaking virtually at an international conference in May 2025, for instance, Gabbard said that “for far too long,” citizens have repeatedly been told by government officials that they “must sacrifice liberty sometimes in the name of more security.” She further implored state actors to work to balance “national security needs” with ensuring the protection of individuals’ “personal privacy and liberty.”
“By embedding and respecting privacy norms internationally, we make it harder for any government, including our own, to deviate from them, to undermine those liberties and privacies,” Gabbard said. “We have to work with each other, communicate to each other about … what steps we can collectively take to defend liberty and individual freedom and ensure privacy. By doing so, together we can forge a path forward that truly upholds our ideals as free nations and our basic rights as individuals.”
Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas will assume the position of Acting DNI upon Gabbard’s departure, according to Trump.
