In Washington they are talking about accountability again. The word gets used the way people in Honolulu use aloha — constantly, ceremonially, and sometimes to mean its opposite. But something concrete is happening at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the person making it happen grew up on the windward side of Oahu, which means it belongs to us whether we claim it or not.
Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii’s second district, DNI since February 2025. The partisan arguments about her you already know. Set those aside. What she has actually done in office is more interesting than what anyone thinks of her.
The Federal Question
Gabbard cut roughly forty percent of ODNI staff. She established direct whistleblower reporting lines on her first day. She revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former officials she accused of politicizing intelligence work. The reforms — branded internally as ODNI 2.0 — are projected to save taxpayers close to a billion dollars annually.
In July 2025 she released declassified documents alleging the Obama administration had manufactured and politicized intelligence to undermine the incoming Trump presidency in 2016 and 2017. She referred the materials to the Department of Justice, which convened a grand jury. The allegations may hold up or they may not. Grand juries have their own weather. But the principle she articulated when she made the documents public was plain enough: unelected officials who operate beyond public oversight are dangerous to a republic, and the only corrective is transparency backed by consequence.
Anyone who has tried to get a straight answer out of a state agency on Ward Avenue already knows this principle by feel, even if they have never had occasion to name it.
The Local Mirror
The Hawaii Commission on Judicial Conduct investigates allegations of misconduct against sitting judges. Four members of the general public and three attorneys serve on it. All appointed by the Supreme Court — the institution whose members the Commission is supposed to oversee. When the Commission finds misconduct, it does not discipline the judge. It forwards a recommendation to the Supreme Court, which decides for itself. State law explicitly excludes judges and justices from the jurisdiction of the Hawaii State Ethics Commission, so the public and the press cannot easily learn what gifts are reported, when complaints are filed, or how the review process works. Honolulu Civil Beat documented this in 2023.
A person could call that arrangement many things. Accountability would be generous.
The same structural problem — oversight that reports to the institution it oversees — is what Gabbard claims she found in the intelligence community. The scenery changes. The architecture does not.
Public Records and the Transparency Gap
Hawaii has a Uniform Information Practices Act. It has the Sunshine Law. The laws exist, and in principle they guarantee public access to government records and open meetings.
In practice, the system works the way a county building permit office works: everything is technically available if you already know which counter to stand at, which form to fill out, and whom to call when the form does not produce a response. In January 2026, Civil Beat documented what it called Hawaii’s transparency problem — not outright secrecy so much as a system so fragmented and hard to navigate that meaningful oversight becomes an endurance test most people lose. Try to find out who is lobbying on this year’s housing bills. The data may be online. It is scattered across portals and commissions in ways that demand cross-referencing skills the system was never designed to teach you.
Compliance without comprehensibility. The letter of the law honored, its spirit quietly buried in a filing cabinet.
Gabbard describes the same phenomenon at the federal level in different vocabulary. The vocabulary does not matter. The outcome — a public that cannot see what its government is doing — is identical.
The Bribery Investigation That Went Quiet
Former State Senator J. Kalani English and former State Representative Ty Cullen served federal prison sentences after accepting bribes from Milton Choy, a wastewater company owner who died while incarcerated. English and Cullen were released in 2024.
Then the story went somewhere it should not have been able to go. It went quiet.
Civil Beat reported in 2025 that federal prosecutors had documented additional transactions — a three-thousand-dollar payment to Cullen, a thirty-five-thousand-dollar payment to another unnamed “influential” lawmaker — that experts say were likely illegal. Three years passed. No charges. The Commission to Improve Standards of Conduct, created in 2022 to address exactly these failures, had produced recommendations the Legislature declined to pass. Attorney General Anne Lopez said the state would not pursue its own investigation.
So a retired federal public defender named Alexander Silvert started a petition. He wanted the Legislature to establish an investigative committee with subpoena power and the authority to hold public hearings. His reasoning was blunt: the feds moved on, the state will not act, and the Legislature is what is left.
You can hear the same reasoning in Gabbard’s intelligence reforms, stripped of the national security language and laid bare: when the watchers refuse to watch, someone else has to.
Whistleblowers and the Cost of Speaking Up
Among Gabbard’s first acts as DNI was a directive ensuring every member of the intelligence community understood their rights as potential whistleblowers. She opened a direct reporting line. In July 2025 she highlighted the case of a whistleblower whose reports of wrongdoing had been ignored through multiple attempts at official channels.
Now think about what whistleblowing means in Hawaii. Not in Washington, where you can disappear into a city of seven hundred thousand strangers after you file your complaint. In Hawaii, where you will see the person you reported at Foodland on Saturday. Where your kids go to the same school. Where your cousin works in the same building as the official you named, and everyone will know by Monday.
A state employee files a complaint about a judge. A county worker questions a contracting decision. A teacher reports misuse of funds. Each of them risks something the federal whistleblower protection statutes were never written to cover — the slow, thorough social consequences of a community that does not forget.
If Hawaii wants accountability that functions rather than accountability that performs, it has to protect these people. Not with language in a statute. With institutional culture that treats disclosure as civic duty instead of betrayal. That kind of culture does not get built by the Legislature. It gets built, or it does not, by the rest of us.
What Reform Looks Like
Whether Gabbard’s specific claims about the Obama administration hold up, whether every cut she made at ODNI was wise — these are open questions with legal and political answers still being written. People of good faith disagree. Let them.
What cannot be honestly disputed is that the questions she forced into public view — about power that operates without oversight, about institutions that serve their own continuity before the public interest, about transparency as performance rather than practice — are the same questions Hawaii has failed to answer about itself for years. They remain unanswered on Ward Avenue, at the State Capitol, and in courtrooms across the islands.
The people of this state are not served by a system that investigates corruption only when the federal government forces the issue. They are not served by judicial oversight that answers to the judiciary. They are not served by transparency you need a data science degree to navigate, or by a political culture that treats the person who speaks up as the problem.
A woman from Hawaii’s second district decided accountability was worth the cost. She took that conviction to Washington and detonated it inside the intelligence community. The question for the rest of us — the people who live here, who raise our families here, who depend on these institutions and have no security clearance to revoke — is whether we are willing to do the same thing at home.