James Dobson stepped down as president and chief executive of Focus on the Family in 2003, more than a quarter century after founding it, but he did not leave the organization outright. He continued as board chairman until resigning that role in February 2009, and only fully departed in early 2010, closing a chapter that had run for more than three decades. Jim Daly, who had become president in 2005, took over the daily broadcast and continues co-hosting it today.
Dobson did not retire. In 2010 he founded the James Dobson Family Institute and launched a new daily broadcast, Family Talk, built around the same clinical and biblical approach to family life that had defined his original program. By the time of his death, Family Talk was carried on more than 1,500 radio outlets, including numerous stations owned by Salem Media Group, the commercial Christian broadcaster that by then had become one of the largest distributors of Christian talk programming in the country.
Dobson died August 21, 2025, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at eighty nine. Both broadcasts he built continue: Focus on the Family under Jim Daly's leadership, still headquartered in the Colorado Springs campus Dobson's organization moved to in 1991, and Family Talk under the institute Dobson founded specifically to keep broadcasting after he had already built and left one of American religious radio's largest ministries.