The United States President-elect Donald Trump has named Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard - a former Democratic congresswoman who joined the Republican Party to back Donald Trump - will oversee US intelligence agencies like the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), which focuses on intelligence gathering.
The nomination has raised questions over Gabbard's lack of experience in intelligence as well as her positions on key foreign policy issues over the years. She will require Senate confirmation to take up the role. If she is confirmed to the role Gabbard would manage a budget of more than $70bn and oversee 18 intelligence agencies.
But the nomination has sparked criticism in some quarters. Reacting to the appointment on X, Democratic Virginia congresswoman member of the House Intelligence Committee Abigail Spanberger said she was “appalled at the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard”.
“Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin,” she said.
Tulsi Gabbard, 43, a military veteran who served with a medical unit in Iraq and was deployed in Kuwait, has set a number of political precedents in her career.
She was the first Hindu in the US Congress as well as its first member born in the US territory of American Samoa. She was raised in Hawaii and spent a year of her childhood in the Philippines. 
She was a representative from Hawaii’s second district in the US House of Representatives for four terms from 2013 to 2021. While she was in the House, she was a Democrat. Gabbard supported Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 presidential bid. She also ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2020 as a Democrat.
However, in 2022, she left the party and became an independent. In a video message she posted on her YouTube channel and X account in October 2022, she said: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” She also accused the party of stoking “anti-white racism”.
In August this year, Gabbard formally endorsed Trump in his presidential bid. In October, she announced she was joining the Republican Party at a Trump rally in North Carolina.
As the director of national intelligence (DNI) Gabbard will be the head of the US Intelligence Community, who will oversee the National Intelligence Program and serves as an adviser to the president, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council on matters of national security.
The position was created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US. The first DNI was appointed by former President George W Bush in 2005.
The National Intelligence Program funds intelligence activities in several federal departments and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Intelligence Community comprises 18 organizations, which the DNI oversees. Besides the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, they are: Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of the Treasury, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Navy Intelligence and Space Force Intelligence.
Notably, Gabbard does not have direct experience in an intelligence position and, unlike other DNIs, has not held any senior government roles. Gabbard served for two years in the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Time and time again, she has been critical of and has diverged from the US Intelligence Community’s decisions. She has largely taken an anti-interventionist stance. In other words, she has advocated for the US to stay uninvolved when it comes to conflicts around the world.
Gabbard has been accused of amplifying Russian propaganda. Three days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Gabbard posted a video on her X account urging the US, Russia and Ukraine to “put geopolitics aside” and accept that Ukraine “will be a neutral country” without being a member of military alliances such as NATO.
In March 2022, she posted another video on X saying there are more than 25 US-funded biolabs in Ukraine. She wrote it after a claim originated in Moscow that US-backed bioweapons labs were operating in Ukraine. The claim was denied by the US and Ukraine, and there is no independent evidence to back the assertion.
Gabbard has opposed US intervention in the Syrian war, which sprung up in 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad cracked down on peaceful protests against his government, which then developed into a rebellion.
In 2015, she criticized former Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration for supporting the Syrian opposition movement against al-Assad.
In 2017 during a secret trip to Syria, Gabbard met al-Assad, she told CNN. “Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” she told CNN.
Gabbard was critical of the decisions made by Trump’s administration during his first term in office from 2017 to 2021 on Iran issue.
In 2020, she said the Trump administration provided “no justification whatsoever” during an intelligence briefing on the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force. He was assassinated in 2020 in a US air raid in Iraq outside Baghdad’s international airport.
Gabbard has had a close relationship with the Indian government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom she has met multiple times.
The Intercept news site found in 2019 that Gabbard’s House campaigns had received donations from more than 100 individuals associated with a Hindu majoritarian movement that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is a part of.
In January 2019, Gabbard was a guest of honor at the Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas, the Indian government’s annual diaspora outreach event, in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.
Gabbard’s nomination comes less than a month after the US unsealed an indictment against former Indian intelligence officer Vikash Yadav, accusing him of a foiled plot to murder Indian-American Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the US in 2023.
Gabbard has also criticized pro-Palestine protesters in the US in recent months, describing them as “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization” in an apparent reference to Hamas. She has fully backed Israel’s war in Gaza, in which more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children.