Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report on Friday finding that women now hold 17.4 percent of Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions in President Trump's second administration, down from the 52 percent women held under President Biden — a fall the report tracks across the military's senior ranks and the ambassador corps as well. The report was commissioned by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the committee's ranking member and its only woman.
At the Pentagon, the report found, only eight of the 201 candidates put forward for senior military posts this year were women — about 4 percent, less than half the average share over the previous decade. No woman currently serves as an active-duty four-star officer. In the diplomatic corps, nearly half of Senate-confirmed ambassadors were women when Mr. Trump took office in January 2025; today fewer than 25 diplomatic missions worldwide are led by a woman ambassador. Those numbers sit inside a wider vacancy problem the report also counts: 93 of 196 ambassadorships stand unfilled, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
The report also details the dismantling of the programs that supported women overseas. The State Department's reorganization eliminated the Office of Global Women's Issues and its ambassador-at-large, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to end the Pentagon's implementation of Women, Peace and Security — a program created by a bipartisan law, written by Shaheen, that President Trump himself signed in 2017.
The Democrats' argument is the one Shaheen has made for a decade: that this is a security question, not a symbolism question. The research behind her 2017 law found that peace agreements are 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years when women are at the negotiating table, and she has told the committee that every four-star combatant commander has described the program as a strategic advantage China and Russia do not have. A senior leadership drawn from a narrowing pipeline, the report concludes, leaves the United States weaker against those rivals.
The White House answered that the President's record says the opposite. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, defended the administration in a statement, describing Mr. Trump as a champion for women and moms and pointing to the women in senior positions across the government, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. At the State Department, Paloma Chacon, the principal deputy spokeswoman, said the President had appointed women to senior diplomatic and departmental leadership positions while prioritizing merit in Foreign Service appointments. Another White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, has put the principle plainly: the President judges personnel on individual merit and qualifications, not gender.
The appointments record behind that answer is real. Mr. Trump made Wiles the first woman ever to serve as White House chief of staff, and she remains in the job. He put women at the head of the Department of Homeland Security (Kristi Noem), the Justice Department (Pam Bondi), the intelligence community (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Labor Department (Lori Chavez-DeRemer) — eight women in Cabinet-level posts at the start of the term. What the Democrats' numbers also capture is what happened next: Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer and Gabbard were the first four Cabinet-level officials to leave this administration, each was replaced by a man, and that run of departures is a large part of why the share the report measures now reads 17.4 percent.
That is where the argument actually sits. The administration's case is that it has scrapped quotas and diversity machinery and simply picks the person it judges best for each job — and that the women it did elevate reached the very top of the government. The Democrats' case is that outcomes this consistent are not neutral: a promotion slate that is 4 percent women, and a four-star corps with no women in it at all, are what a pipeline looks like after the programs built to widen it have been dismantled. Both sides claim the same word — merit. The numbers in Friday's report are the Democrats' attempt to settle what the word has produced.
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