President Trump on Monday signed an executive order that creates a women's health division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force charged with turning research on conditions that disproportionately or uniquely affect women into better care. Melania Trump, who pressed the administration to give women's health a higher priority in medical research, spoke at the Rose Garden ceremony.
Under the order, the health and human services secretary, working through the NIH director, has 90 days to set up the division inside one of the agency's institutes or centers. The new unit is to work alongside the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health, which has existed since 1990, rather than replace it. Its assignments range from closer scientific review of conditions that remain poorly understood to coordinating research, including replication studies, and bringing more women and girls into clinical trials. It is also told to hold grant recipients to the NIH policy that studies account for sex as a biological variable and to help move findings into clinical practice.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who recently announced that she is free from breast cancer, will co-chair the task force. The order adds the secretaries of War, Agriculture, Labor, Education and Veterans Affairs, along with the leaders of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The health department will pay the panel's administrative costs.
"Previous generations fought for women's rights. Our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest," the first lady said in her remarks, adding that the order establishes "a new standard for women's health in America." She set out five priorities, which include steering research money toward diseases that affect women in unique ways, harnessing new technology to speed discoveries and moving promising therapies from laboratories to patients faster while keeping strict safety standards. She also asked that breakthroughs be affordable to women regardless of their finances and that "generations of silence" give way to open conversation, education and compassion.
The president praised what he called his wife's "extraordinary leadership and skills." According to USA Today, which reported the plan before the signing, the first lady organized working sessions that brought together doctors she had consulted, East Wing policy staff, the president, Kennedy and others to shape the order. The White House fact sheet describes the order as "led by First Lady Melania Trump."
The order's statement of policy says many diseases and conditions that disproportionately or uniquely affect women have not drawn the research and clinical attention that others have. Its list runs from heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's disease to endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, maternal health and menopause. The order also revokes Executive Order 14120, which former President Joe Biden signed in March 2024, and a November 2023 presidential memorandum on the White House Initiative on Women's Health Research. The White House says dropping them widens the federal focus beyond research to putting results into clinical care.
The order does not set a dollar figure. It is to be carried out subject to the availability of appropriations, and the White House had not said how much money would go to research or treatment, USA Today reported. The NIH typically spends about $5 billion a year on women's health, roughly 10% of its budget, a level the paper said has held steady from one administration to the next.
Some women's health advocates welcomed the commitment but said they would follow it with caution, the paper reported. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, executive director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at New York University School of Law, pointed to the president's record on abortion, health care spending and federal research, saying it is "at odds with the deliverables touted in the executive order."
The fact sheet ties the order to earlier steps, including the FDA's move last November to begin removing "black box" warnings from hormone replacement therapy products for menopause, a change Kennedy announced. The task force was scheduled to convene for the first time Monday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room, according to the New York Post.