The turbulent 15 months of Trump’s unlikely US intelligence director

Tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the country’s top intelligence official ended on Friday, when she submitted her resignation as director of national intelligence.

Gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role: the former Democrat lacked an intelligence background and her foreign policy views at times diverged from Donald Trump’s, particularly on questions of overseas military intervention. And yet she also took unusual measures to ingratiate herself to the president by vowing to root out politicization across US spy agencies and embracing his agenda of election denial.

Over time, Gabbard became increasingly sidelined by the president, who excluded her from key national security conversations on Iran and Venezuela, according to people familiar with the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI).

“She had been playing on the outskirts of the inner circle for a while,” said Emily Harding, director of the intelligence, national security and technology (INT) program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

A spokesperson for Gabbard’s office said these claims, as well as rumors that Gabbard had been forcibly ousted from office, were “100% false”.

In Gabbard’s January 2025 confirmation hearing, the Republican senator Tom Cotton told the former Hawaii representative that “the measure of your success will largely depend on whether you can return the ODNI to its original size, scope and mission”.

The interagency coordination office had become bloated and ponderous over its 20-some-year mandate, several lawmakers believed, and the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy mandate Project 2025 pushed for its reform.

Gabbard told lawmakers that she would “address efficiencies, redundancies and effectiveness” across the sprawling 2,000-person agency. She claims to have reduced her staff by 30% since assuming office, and at least 100 employees accepted early retirement programs offered at both the CIA and the ODNI in 2025.

Gabbard also introduced a taskforce to cut costs and investigate “weaponization” across the intelligence community. The Director’s Initiatives Group, or DIG, examined Trump’s priority topics, including the origins of Covid-19, allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections and anomalous health incidents, such as Havana syndrome.

The DIG was dismantled in December following an interagency controversy and given a final termination date in June. It’s unclear whether the group achieved its goals.

Like Trump, Gabbard demanded loyalty within her office. “She is now tight with a very inner circle,” said a person familiar with her office earlier this year.

Chief among Gabbard’s confidants is Alexa Henning, her acting chief of staff. The political appointee came to Washington from Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ office, where she referred to herself in a social media post as “one of the governor’s henchmen”.

Henning demonstrated equal loyalty as Gabbard’s spokesperson leading up to her confirmation to head the ODNI, swatting off questions about Gabbard’s ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a religious cult based in Hawaii, and dismissing claims that Gabbard held sympathy for dictators such as Vladimir Putin or former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Once Gabbard took office, Henning often adopted an aggressive and unusual stance towards media and other intelligence leaders, repeatedly deriding the Senate intelligence committee’s vice-chair, Mark Warner, on X, and calling out Republicans who didn’t support Gabbard’s bid to lead the intelligence center.

“She’s treating a serious, policy-based job like she’s working on a campaign,” a seasoned congressional aide said earlier this year. “It’s unprecedented. This is historically not a partisan job.”

An ODNI spokesperson called Henning a “highly talented leader with extensive experience gained in the first Trump administration, as a senior aide to several members of Congress, and in the private sector”.

The spokesperson said that they spoke with several ODNI staff who disputed claims that Henning was taking a partisan or bombastic approach to her job.

Trump first dismissed Gabbard’s input as an intelligence chief in June 2025, amid a joint mission between Israel and the US to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and assassinate nuclear scientists inside the country. The president was asked by reporters about Gabbard’s previous Senate testimony that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. The president had recently endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran.

Shortly after Trump’s rebuke, Gabbard did an about-face and said Iran could produce a nuclear weapon “within weeks”. The episode underscored the tension between a director of national intelligence who had long been skeptical of foreign intervention and a president who was moving toward more aggressive military action overseas.

In February, Trump came to Gabbard’s defense when she faced public scrutiny for appearing at a raid on an election polling center in Fulton county, Georgia: the FBI conducted a surprise raid on the office in January and seized ballots and other materials related to the 2020 election, which Trump has falsely claimed was rigged against him. Democrats expressed deep concern that Gabbard was present at a domestic law enforcement operation.

“When the nation’s top intelligence official inserts herself into a matter with no connection to a foreign threat, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the objective was political – namely, getting back into Donald Trump’s good graces – and that her presence was meant to lay the groundwork for baseless claims of foreign interference,” Warner said at the time.

But Trump appeared pleased with Gabbard. “She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in – at Pam [Bondi, the former attorney general]’s insistence – she went in and she looked at votes that want to be checked out,” Trump said to congregants at a national prayer breakfast. “Why is she doing it, right, Pam? Why is she doing it? Because Pam wanted her to do it. And you know why? Because she’s smart.”

Weeks later, Gabbard again strained her relationship with the president by failing to condemn the resignation of her former deputy, Joe Kent, who quit over Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

After that, Trump began questioning Gabbard’s leadership of the nation’s intelligence agencies. The Guardian reported that Trump began polling cabinet members on whether he should fire Gabbard in March – a red flag for people in the president’s administration.

The director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has allegedly eclipsed Gabbard as Trump’s preferred national security adviser, according to several people familiar with the office.

“This White House has been selective in who they’ve looked to to participate in certain issues,” said a former senior intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They already made their call and were including Ratcliffe in everything.”

Gabbard said on Friday that she was resigning from office because her husband had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Gabbard will lead the ODNI until 30 June, her resignation letter says. The White House has named Aaron Lukas to succeed her as an acting director.

Trump has not commented at length about Gabbard’s resignation, but said in a Friday statement that she “has done an incredible job, and we will miss her”.