The turbulent 15 months of Trump’s unlikely US intelligence director
Over 15 months, the ex-Democrat without an intelligence background took actions seemingly meant to flatter Trump
Tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the US’s top intelligence official ended Friday, when Gabbard submitted her resignation as director of national intelligence.
Gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background. Her political views, particularly on foreign intervention, have at times diverged from Donald Trump’s. But she also undertook norm-breaking actions as the country’s top intelligence chief that appeared designed to flatter Trump and his agenda of election denial.
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.
“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).
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 [the office of the director of national intelligence] to its original size, scope, and mission”.
The interagency coordination office had become bloated and ponderous over its 20-some-year mandate, some lawmakers believed, and the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy mandate Project 2025 pushed for dramatic 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, like 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 the 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 spokeswomanperson leading up to her confirmation to head the ODNI, swatting off questions about herGabbard’s ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a religious cult based in Hawaii, and dismissing claims that Gabbard held sympathy for dictators like 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 Iintelligence Ccommittee vice-chair Mark Warner on X, and calling out Republicans who didn’t support Gabbard’s bid to lead the intelligence center.
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 hasfalsely 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 once 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.
Gabbard said 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 Gabbard “has done an incredible job, and we will miss her”.
So the bottom line is 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. Wonder how this will land.
So the bottom line is gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background. Wonder how this will land.
Considering gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background, it raises some real questions about what happens next.
Trump Tulsi has been vocal about this, good to see them staying on it.
When you look at gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background, the implications are hard to ignore.
The bigger issue here is tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the US’s top intelligence official ended Friday, when Gabbard submitted her resignation as director of national intelligence. That changes the calculation.
15 months. The real figures are likely much higher.
Think about it: gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background. That speaks volumes.
Basically gabbard told lawmakers that she would “address efficiencies, redundancies and effectiveness” across the sprawling 2,000-person agency. What matters is whether anything changes because of it.
Think about it: 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. That speaks volumes.
Still waiting to hear what Emily Harding actually plans to do about it.
The detail about over 15 months, the ex-Democrat without an intelligence background took actions seemingly meant to flatter is something people should sit with.
Considering tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the US’s top intelligence official ended Friday, when Gabbard submitted her resignation as director of national intelligence, it raises some real questions about what happens next.
The bigger issue here is gabbard was an unconventional choice for the role, given she was a former Democrat with no notable intelligence background. That changes the calculation.
If tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the US’s top intelligence official ended Friday, when Gabbard submitted her resignation as director of national intelligence, then the bigger picture starts to look very different.