President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump signed an executive order in the Rose Garden on Monday creating a Women's Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House Women's Health Task Force, an initiative the first lady personally shaped to close what she called a long-standing gap in American medicine. The order directs federal research toward diseases that affect women disproportionately, uses artificial intelligence to speed up discovery, and aims to move therapies faster from the lab to patients while keeping care affordable. Melania Trump said the effort establishes "a new standard for women's health in America" that will "improve outcomes in all phases of life."
"It was abundantly clear that women's healthcare needs to be modernized, the research gap closed, and further, the need to accelerate the discovery of treatments and cures was glaring." — First Lady Melania Trump
The first lady pressed the administration to give women's health greater priority and organized working sessions with physicians, Health and Human Services officials and other experts to shape the order. "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 to shape this Executive Order, establish the task force, and create a new department within the NIH, dedicated to women's health exclusively," she said. President Trump praised his wife's "extraordinary leadership and skills," saying she will "help improve the health of our nation's women and girls." The task force will be led by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who recently announced she is free of breast cancer, together with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it was set to hold its first meeting Monday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room.
The order targets conditions including maternal health, mental health, endometriosis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and stroke. The new NIH division will not replace the agency's Office of Research on Women's Health, established in 1990, but will carry a broader mandate that includes coordinating agencies to improve care for women and girls. "Improving the health of all Americans is a top priority for President Trump and the first lady, and this task force will work to close critical research gaps and strengthen care for women across all stages of life, targeting some of the most widespread health conditions affecting them," White House spokesperson Allison Schuster said. The NIH currently spends about $5 billion a year on women's health, roughly 10 percent of its annual budget; the order does not specify new funding targets.
The signing comes as the administration has also moved to cut NIH grants on diversity-related topics and downsize the federal healthcare workforce since January 2025, steps critics cite when questioning the government's research priorities. The White House frames Monday's order as a direct answer: a dedicated division inside the NIH, a task force chaired from the West Wing, and a first lady who built the policy through months of sessions with doctors and agency officials rather than leaving women's health as a side program inside a general research budget.
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