President Trump signed an order creating a new women’s health division at the National Institutes of Health, an idea he credited to First Lady Melania Trump.
Story Highlights
- On Monday, Oct. 19, Trump signed the order “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life” in the White House Rose Garden.
- The Department of Health and Human Services has 90 days to set up a Women’s Health Division inside the National Institutes of Health.
- Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will co-chair a new White House Women’s Health Task Force.
- The order covers women’s health from infancy through pregnancy, menopause and old age, including heart disease, cancer, endometriosis and maternal health.
- No dollar amount is attached to the order yet.
President Signs Order With First Lady at His Side
Trump said he signed the order because the government had no division devoted to women’s health, and he gave his wife the credit for spotting it. “Think of it, a women’s health division,” he said. “Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division? Melania said, ‘They don’t have it.'” The first lady added her own signature after his, a symbolic gesture with no legal weight. “This is a transformative moment for women in America,” she said.
Trump called the order a “historic action” that would “really go after the understudied diseases affecting women.” He also praised Wiles, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in March, stayed on the job through treatment and announced in September that she is cancer-free. Trump said she “won her battle against a very tough opponent, breast cancer.”
What the Order Does
The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, is the federal government’s main medical research agency. The new division will work with the NIH’s existing Office of Research on Women’s Health, which opened in 1990. Its jobs include reviewing conditions that have had too little study, pushing for better ways to diagnose and treat them, and making sure more women and girls are included in clinical trials, the studies that test new drugs and treatments on people. It will also hold research grant holders to the NIH rule that studies must account for differences between men and women.
The task force brings together the heads of several departments and agencies, including Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. Its job is to move research into real care faster and to make sure agencies work together. It held its first meeting on Monday, Oct. 19. The order also replaces a 2024 executive order and a 2023 memo on women’s health research from the Biden administration.
What Changes for Families
The order does not change anyone’s insurance coverage or what happens at the doctor’s office. What it changes is where federal research attention goes. The conditions it names include heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, chronic pain, mental health, infertility, menopause and endometriosis, a painful condition in which tissue like the lining of the womb grows outside it. The White House says the goals are faster cures, new treatments at an affordable price and less stigma around talking about women’s health.
The first lady’s plan also calls for using “super intelligence,” advanced artificial intelligence, to better understand women’s bodies and speed up medical discoveries. Officials have not released the systems that would be used. Nothing in the order replaces care from a doctor, and any woman with symptoms should keep seeing her own health care provider.
A Gap Years in the Making
A 2024 National Academies review found that only 8.8 percent of NIH grant spending from 2013 to 2023 went to women’s health research. The review also found that share had shrunk over time, even as the agency’s budget grew. Conditions like endometriosis, fibroids and polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormone disorder that can affect fertility, have drawn little study despite affecting millions of American women.
Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act in 1993, which required women to be included in federally funded clinical research. More than three decades later, the funding share for women’s health is still small. The order sets a 90-day clock to get the new division running, and it is written so that spending depends on money Congress provides. Funding amounts have not been set.