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

Tulsi Gabbard’s tumultuous 15-month tenure as the nation’s top intelligence official ended 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 with Donald Trump, 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. “She had been playing on the outskirts of the inner circle for a while,” said Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, 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, 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. “She’s treating a serious, policy-based job like she’s working on a campaign,” a seasoned congressional aide told the Guardian 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 Februar