WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Trump administration Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard announced her resignation Friday to refocus her time on supporting her husband following a grave cancer diagnosis.

In her resignation letter to President Donald Trump, Gabbard said she is leaving her post effective June 30 because her husband Abraham has “recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer” giving him “major challenges” in the weeks and months to come. 

She said she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the ​Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half,” but “cannot ‌in ⁠good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming post.”

Today, with great humility and sincere appreciation, I shared the below letter with President Trump. It has been a profound honor to serve the American people as DNI. pic.twitter.com/p7AZ4wa9Yi

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) May 22, 2026

Trump reacted on Truth Social, declaring, “I have no doubt he will soon be better than ever. Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her. Her highly respected Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lukas, will serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence.”

Gabbard, a former far-left Democrat and Hawaii National Guard member who endorsed socialist Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, vocally distanced herself from and eventually broke with her former party in recent years and endorsed Trump in August 2024, citing their shared alignment with more libertarian/populist strains of foreign policy ideology.

Trump’s subsequent selection of Gabbard for DNI, a position primarily tasked with those foreign policy areas where her views differ significantly from traditional conservatives and Republicans, provoked doubt about her chances for making it through the Senate, with critics fixating on controversial past stances about geopolitical adversaries such as Iran, Syria, and Russia and leakers of classified material such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

During her confirmation hearing, she won over skeptical Republicans when the far more hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) vouched for Gabbard as a veteran who “understands” that “our intelligence community has grown too bloated, too bureaucratic, and it doesn’t do enough collection of intelligence.” Over the course of her tenure, several observers questioned how much influence she had within the administration following its limited strike on Iran last year and more involved current operation against the country.