Trump Orders NIH Women’s Health Division, Adding White House Task Force Amid Funding Strain

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that calls for a new division within the National Institutes of Health focused on women’s health and a new task force inside the White House. First lady Melania Trump announced the initiative, saying, “Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health,” and describing a push to find cures so women can live “with health and to the fullest.”

The new NIH division is to be set up within 90 days. According to the announcement, it is intended to streamline research into understudied diseases in women, advance innovation in diagnostics and improve treatment. The White House task force was set to convene its first session Monday.

The order creates policy structure at a moment when women’s health research has been politically exposed rather than institutionally insulated. That makes the announcement meaningful for strategy and signaling, but less definitive on operations because the administration did not disclose how the new NIH division will be built or funded beyond administrative support for the task force.

What The Order Creates

The Department of Health and Human Services will pay the administrative costs of the task force, the order said. The task force will be led by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who recently completed a round of breast cancer treatment. Members include cabinet secretaries such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, and Erica Schwartz, the newly confirmed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An NIH spokesperson told STAT on background that the division will work with the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health and will not replace that office. The spokesperson said the new division would expand and coordinate research on understudied women’s health conditions across all stages of life, improve diagnosis and treatment, strengthen inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials, and increase accountability for considering sex as a biological variable in NIH-funded research.

Trump, speaking after the first lady, said he had been surprised there was no women’s health division with the NIH. His remarks drew a distinction between the existing office and the new structure the order would establish.

The Policy Context

The executive order lands after months of pressure on scientific research more broadly and women’s health in particular since Trump returned to the White House. STAT reported that scientists said their work had been put at risk when it fell into the blast zone of “gender ideology,” with the word “women” in grants triggering special reviews at the NIH while academic research faced moves to slash funding or eliminate diversity mentions or both.

That tension matters because the order promises institutional expansion in an area where researchers have also been confronting uncertainty about the federal funding base. In June, Nicole Kleinstreuer, deputy director for program coordination, planning, and strategic initiatives at NIH, predicted a refresh of the NIH-wide strategic plan for women’s health research in the fall. Speaking at a Yale conference, she said the effort would explicitly emphasize innovative methods and technologies and data science to comprehensively prevent and treat conditions affecting women.

The signal here is that the administration is trying to separate women’s health from broader political fights by elevating it through a new division and a White House-led body. Whether that changes research behavior will depend on budget support and execution details that were not included in Monday’s order.

Why The Research Gap Matters

STAT cited long-standing evidence of underinvestment and uneven care. Basmah Safdar, an emergency medicine physician and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale, wrote in an Aug. 17 Lancet commentary that chronic underinvestment in women’s health calls for new funding structures. She argued that reframing women’s health through a rigorous, biology-based framework would correct a health care system built on incomplete science and missed opportunities.

A 2025 review in Science Advances, as summarized by STAT, found that historical neglect leaves women at greater risk than men for adverse drug reactions, makes them more likely to die from undiagnosed stroke, and means they receive less effective treatments for chronic pain conditions. STAT also pointed to a landmark 2000 study saying women are seven times more likely than men to have a heart condition misdiagnosed or to be sent home from a hospital during a heart attack, plus research presented in 2024 indicating that women admitted to a hospital are less likely to leave with prescriptions that reduce the risk of another cardiac problem.

For industry and research institutions, the executive order may open a clearer federal channel for women’s health priorities in trial design, diagnostics and translational research. But the order’s market impact will remain limited until the administration spells out how the division will operate alongside the current Office of Research on Women’s Health and what resources it will actually control.