After a weeks-long effort to win over a handful of Senate Republican skeptics, Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed Wednesday morning by a 52-48 vote along party lines to serve as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence. Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell joined every Senate Democrat in opposing her confirmation.
Wednesday morning’s confirmation vote represents a major triumph for Gabbard, who was initially considered one of Trump’s most vulnerable nominees due to her unorthodox foreign policy views.
A lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, Gabbard will now have sweeping authority to declassify secrets, brief the president on intelligence-related matters, and oversee the federal government’s vast intelligence community (IC). This former Hawaii congresswoman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has repeatedly pledged that if confirmed, she will check her politics at the door at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as she has in the U.S. military for more than two decades.
After a tense confirmation hearing last month that centered around her unorthodox views on foreign policy, warrantless wiretaps, and national security leaker Edward Snowden, she now begins the job with plans to shake up the federal government’s vast and complex intelligence apparatus. A source familiar with her plans tells National Review that Gabbard enters Day One with plans to “end politicization of the IC,” “rebuild trust through transparency and accountability,” and “assess and address efficiency, redundancy, and effectiveness across ODNI to ensure focus of personnel and resources is focused on our core mission of national security.”
Her Wednesday confirmation to Trump’s cabinet comes after a long, closed-door fight to win over skeptics. That confirmation battle hit a turning point last week, when GOP Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.) — a former Marine Corps Intelligence officer long considered a swing-vote on Gabbard — came out in support of her nomination ahead of the Senate Intelligence panel’s closed-door vote. He credits his yes vote to a series of conversations with Vice President JD Vance, who helped secure written assurances from Gabbard regarding how she plans to approach whistleblowers on the job.
Also crucial to Gabbard’s confirmation effort was Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who spent the lead-up to her confirmation hearing counseling the White House on how to persuade and approach on-the-fence members of the Senate Intelligence panel. Cotton’s team also helped draft her hearing testimony, her post-hearing Newsweek op-ed, and respond to senators’ questions for the record.
During her confirmation hearing, Cotton urged Gabbard to join his call to shrink the ODNI and end what are often called “DNI taxes,” the practice of “shifting and directing funds away from the intelligence community’s core mission to the whims and fancies of any particular” director of national intelligence. “Ms. Gabbard, I submit that, if confirmed, the measure of your success will largely depend on whether you can return the ODNI to its original size, scope, and mission,” Cotton said.
“Incredibly, the ODNI is now larger than many agencies it was established to manage,” Cotton added in his opening remarks. “It has fifteen offices and centers, which have many subunits within them. The ODNI staff is measured in the thousands, when it should be measured in the dozens, maybe a few hundred.”
During her private meetings on Capitol Hill over the past few weeks, Gabbard has indeed signaled an openness to transforming the ODNI into a leaner and more efficient operation. And as National Review has reported at length, she has spent recent weeks echoing U.S. Senators’ concerns about intelligence failures or lack of responsiveness to their requests for information, including Hamas’s October 7 terror attack on Israel, anomalous health incidents, and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many Republican lawmakers view the confirmation of Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy — Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — as particularly significant, given both cabinet picks are former Democrats who joined the Trump movement in the final stretch of the campaign.
“It’s a seminal moment” for the Republican Party, Senator Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) told National Review last week. “This team that he’s assembled represents that broad coalition,” the Missouri Republican said. “So the fact that you’ve got a Republican Senate that’s going to sign off on that now I do think is a big deal.”