Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned Friday, telling President Trump in a letter that she will leave the post on June 30 to care for her husband, Abraham, after his diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer. Trump named her principal deputy, Aaron Lukas, acting director.

Gabbard's exit empties the top of the U.S. intelligence apparatus 15 months into her tenure and in the middle of an active war with Iran, a conflict over which she had publicly broken with the White House. Her departure is the fourth Cabinet-level resignation of the year and leaves the 18-agency intelligence community without a confirmed chief overseeing wartime collection, analysis and covert action.

The letter

In the resignation letter, which Gabbard posted on social media, she wrote: "My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer. He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle." She added that she could not "in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position."

Gabbard described her husband as her "rock" through an 11-year marriage that spanned a military deployment, political campaigns and her time in the Trump administration. She told the president she is "fully committed to ensuring a smooth and thorough transition over the coming weeks."

Trump, writing on Truth Social, said Gabbard "has done an incredible job" and named Lukas to fill the role on an acting basis. Fox News first reported the resignation, according to CBS News.

A frayed relationship

Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who endorsed Trump in 2024, was sworn in as DNI in February 2025. Her relationship with the president deteriorated over the administration's path to war with Iran, a country she had opposed striking throughout her political career.

Before U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025, Trump publicly contradicted Gabbard's congressional testimony that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, calling her "wrong." Gabbard later accused the media of "taking my testimony out of context." In March, her top aide Joe Kent, who ran the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned, saying "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation." Gabbard told lawmakers Kent's statement concerned her but added: "Ultimately, we have provided the president with the intelligence assessments and the president is elected by the American people and makes his own decisions based on the information that's available to him."

Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour reported that former intelligence and Trump officials told him Gabbard had been "frozen out of the policymaking process" and that CIA Director John Ratcliffe "has already been running the intelligence community." One former official told Schifrin she "never recovered" from a video she released last summer warning that "political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers," which Trump viewed as an attempt to dissuade him from striking Iran.

Cuts and Fulton County

Gabbard's tenure also drew scrutiny over her January appearance at an FBI search of the Fulton County, Georgia, election office, where agents seized 2020 ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls. The Fulton County Board of Commissioners sued to recover the materials. Gabbard, in a letter to House Democrats at the time, defended her presence as a matter of election security and said Trump had directed her to go, facilitating a call between the president and FBI agents at the scene.

As DNI, Gabbard moved to cut her office's staff by roughly 40 percent, to about 1,300 positions, projecting $700 million in annual savings. She described the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as "bloated and inefficient" and said the intelligence community was "rife with abuse of power." Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard made "significant progress" on Trump's priorities, including "implementing needed reforms to address the weaponization and politicization" of the intelligence community.

The opposition view

Democrats focused on the vacancy rather than the departure. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard's successor "must be committed to restoring trust in the office, protecting the integrity of our intelligence, and ensuring our nation's intelligence professionals can speak truth to power, without fear or interference." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the president "must not treat this vacancy as another opportunity to reward loyalty over competence" and pledged that "Senate Democrats will fight any nominee who puts Trump's politics ahead of America's security."

Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff who now directs George Mason University's Hayden Center, told PBS that Gabbard "was inexperienced to begin with" and "should never have been nominated for the job," and that when she lost favor with Trump she leaned into "conspiracy theories that were discredited surrounding some of our past presidential elections." No Republican source in the dossier contested her record on the merits; GOP officials quoted Friday confined themselves to praise for the cuts and reforms she carried out.

Gabbard's resignation takes effect June 30. Lukas assumes acting authority over the intelligence community immediately, with no Senate-confirmable nominee yet named.