James Dobson led Focus on the Family for twenty six years as president and chief executive before stepping down from that role in 2003, remaining on as board chairman for several more years. Jim Daly took over as president in 2005 while Dobson still chaired the board, an overlap that gave the organization years to work out a leadership transition before Dobson's full departure. Dobson resigned the chairmanship in February 2009 and left the organization entirely in early 2010, more than three decades after founding it.
The transition did not end the flagship broadcast. Daly took over hosting duties on the daily program that still carries the Focus on the Family name, continuing a format Dobson had built and refined for over three decades, now presented by someone who had not created it. The broadcast, along with the magazine, Adventures in Odyssey and the organization's international subsidiary ministries, continued largely unchanged in structure even as its most identifiable public voice departed.
Focus on the Family declared itself a church for United States tax purposes in 2017, a status distinct from how it describes its own religious identity, which remains that of an evangelical Protestant parachurch ministry rather than a congregation. The organization today employs several hundred staff and operates in dozens of countries, run by a leadership Dobson himself did not select for the long term, on a broadcast still carrying the name he gave it in a rented California office in 1977.