Trump Signs Women's Health Executive Order, Creating NIH Division
Melania Trump led Monday's Rose Garden ceremony establishing a Women's Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force. Advocates welcomed the attention — and warned it clashes with the administration's record.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday creating a Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House Women’s Health Task Force, in a Rose Garden ceremony led by first lady Melania Trump.
“This is a transformative moment for women in America. Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health,” the first lady said. The initiative will establish “a new standard for women’s health in America,” she added.
The order directs research money toward diseases that hit women hardest — including osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke — along with maternal health, mental health and endometriosis. It also pushes the use of artificial intelligence to speed up medical research and calls for faster movement of treatments from labs to patients.
The couple signed the order together, passing it between them and exchanging pens. Trump praised his wife’s “extraordinary leadership and skills,” saying she will “help improve the health of our nation’s women and girls.” He said he was surprised to learn the NIH had no women’s health division. “I said, ‘Are you sure they don’t have that?’ Who the hell wouldn’t have a woman’s health division?”
The task force will be led by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who recently announced she is cancer-free after a breast cancer diagnosis, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The task force holds its first meeting Monday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room. Officials at the signing included Kennedy’s wife Cheryl Hines, Dr. Mehmet Oz and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin.
USA Today, which obtained a White House briefing document ahead of the ceremony, reported the push came from the first lady herself. She set up meetings in the East Wing with physicians and public- and private-sector experts, and met with Health and Human Services officials to establish the task force.
The new division will not replace the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, which has existed since 1990. Its mandate runs wider: coordinating agencies to accelerate discoveries and improve care for girls and women. The White House has not said how much money it will put behind the effort. The NIH typically spends about $5 billion a year on women’s health, roughly 10 percent of its budget — a share that has held steady across administrations.
The announcement lands two weeks before the midterm elections. A University of Amherst poll in August put Trump’s approval rating among women at 29 percent.
Some advocates welcomed the attention. Others said the administration’s record is at odds with the announcement. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU’s School of Law, cited Trump’s pride in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, health care cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and cuts to scientific research. “The cascade of harms that stem from the president’s long record of words and deeds,” she said, are “at odds with the deliverables touted in the executive order as proof the White House supports women’s health.”
President Joe Biden signed a women’s health executive order in March 2024 with similar scope — heart disease, menopause, endometriosis and Alzheimer’s. In her husband’s first term, Melania Trump ran the Be Best campaign on children and online safety. This term she has worked on foster care and education tech access, and in September launched Imperia, an initiative bringing together female CEOs.
