Tulsi Gabbard resigned on Friday as Director of National Intelligence, the United States' highest-ranking intelligence official, citing her husband's recent diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer. In her resignation letter, posted on social media, Gabbard wrote: "I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming post." The resignation takes effect on 30 June, and President Donald Trump announced that Principal Deputy Director Aaron Lukas would serve as acting director. Trump said Gabbard had done "an incredible job" and that he would miss her.

Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who later became a Republican ally of Trump, was an unconventional choice for the role from the outset, lacking a background in intelligence work. During her roughly 15 months in office, she claimed to have cut agency staffing by more than 30 percent, oversaw the declassification of high-profile documents including files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and established a taskforce to investigate what the administration described as the "weaponisation" of intelligence agencies. She also drew sharp criticism in January when she appeared at an FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County, Georgia — a county where ballots from the disputed 2020 presidential election were stored — in a move Democrats condemned as an unprecedented politicisation of the intelligence role.

Behind the scenes, however, Gabbard had grown increasingly marginalised. Her relationship with Trump deteriorated notably over the question of Iran: before Trump authorised strikes on Iranian nuclear sites last summer, she publicly warned against escalation with nuclear powers, a move the president reportedly viewed as an attempt to dissuade him. She later reversed her position, stating Iran could produce a nuclear weapon "within weeks." One of her senior deputies, Joe Kent, subsequently resigned in protest over the war with Iran, and Gabbard conspicuously declined to condemn his departure. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, CIA Director John Ratcliffe had by then eclipsed Gabbard as Trump's preferred intelligence adviser, and the White House had begun excluding her from key national security discussions on Iran and Venezuela. Reuters, citing an anonymous source, reported that she had been pressured to leave by the White House, though a spokesperson for Gabbard's office denied she had been forced out.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks to coordinate the work of 18 US intelligence agencies, following findings that poor information-sharing had contributed to security failures. The role has been debated ever since, with bipartisan calls for reform and concerns from some quarters that it had become too large and bureaucratic. Former intelligence officials noted that Gabbard never fully mastered the scope of the job and that her office's increasingly partisan public posture — unusual for an institution traditionally seen as apolitical — damaged its standing. Her departure leaves an institution in continued flux, with questions remaining about the long-term direction of US intelligence under the current administration.