President Donald Trump was expected to sign an executive order Monday creating a new Women's Health Division at the National Institutes of Health alongside a White House Women's Health Task Force, a move first lady Melania Trump helped shape through months of consultations with doctors and policymakers. The order targets a list of conditions including maternal health, mental health, endometriosis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and stroke, according to the White House.
As reported by Yahoo News, Trump signed the order alongside the first lady at an event centered on creating both the new NIH division and the task force. The new NIH division will not replace the agency's existing Office of Research on Women's Health, Yahoo notes, but is designed with a broader mandate that extends beyond pure research funding. The Rose Garden ceremony was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. EDT, according to The Hill.
The first lady described her own role in pushing the initiative forward after consulting with doctors earlier this year. “I acted quickly and organized working sessions between the doctors who I originally consulted, East Wing policy makers, the President, Secretary Kennedy, and other key stakeholders,” she said, per USA Today. The White House Women's Health Task Force will be led by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the outlet reports.
Five Pillars Behind Melania Trump's Push
The first lady's framework rests on five stated priorities, according to The Hill: directing research funding toward conditions that disproportionately affect or are unique to women, using artificial intelligence to deepen understanding of female biology, accelerating the path from laboratory research to patient treatment without sacrificing safety, making breakthroughs affordable regardless of a woman's financial circumstances, and replacing silence around women's health topics with open conversation. Melania Trump has said that women's health care needs modernization, a closed research gap and faster discovery of treatments and cures, as noted in the seed reporting from KFOX.
Despite the sweeping list of targeted conditions, the White House has not disclosed how much money will back the initiative. “The White House has not shared the amount of money designated for research or treatment,” per the same USA Today account. White House officials have said the order aims to close research gaps and modernize care for women, though specific funding goals were not set in the announcement itself.
A Persistent Funding Gap
The administration's announcement arrives against a backdrop of long-documented funding disparities. The NIH typically spends about $5 billion annually on women's health, roughly 10% of its overall budget, the USA Today report notes. Yet just 8.8 percent of NIH grant spending between 2013 and 2023 focused specifically on women's health research, according to a National Academies report.
That same body of research found that NIH's long-standing emphasis on diseases affecting men has reinforced the idea that male bodies are the medical standard, according to the National Academies' detailed chapter on the subject. The report also identifies specific gaps in sex-specific research on endometriosis and reproductive cancers, and notes that pregnancy research often focuses primarily on fetal or infant outcomes rather than the health of the pregnant person herself.
Conditions that disproportionately affect women continue to receive disproportionately low funding relative to the burden they cause. Migraine, headaches, endometriosis and anxiety disorders all attract much less funding in proportion to their disease burden, according to an analysis from Nature. The same analysis found that women made up 42.9% of participants in U.S. oncology clinical trials between 2000 and 2020, despite experiencing 46.5% of the disease burden during that period.
How It Compares to Biden's 2024 Order
Monday's signing follows a similar, though distinct, effort from the prior administration. President Joe Biden signed his own executive order on women's health in March 2024, addressing heart disease, menopause, perimenopause, endometriosis and Alzheimer's disease, according to USA Today's reporting. At the time, the Biden administration called on Congress to approve $12 billion in new funding for women's health research, per a fact sheet from the Biden White House archives.
The National Academies report goes further still, recommending that NIH form an entirely new institute dedicated to women's health research and that Congress appropriate $15.7 billion in new funding over five years for women's health, sex-differences research and workforce development. That proposal envisions $4 billion for a dedicated, independent budget for the new institute and $11.4 billion for an NIH-wide interdisciplinary research fund, the organization says.
International comparisons cited in the Nature analysis underscore how small women's health budgets have historically been elsewhere, too. The UK's Medical Research Council spent £96 million, or about $119 million, on women's health research over five years starting in 2014 — an amount roughly equal to its spending on cardiovascular disease alone during that same stretch.
