Trump Creates NIH Women's Health Division via Executive Order — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Trump signed an executive order Monday creating a new NIH women's health division — set up within 90 days — alongside a White House task force, with first lady Melania Trump announcing, "Beginning today, we will change the reality of women's health."
- The new NIH division will not replace the existing Office of Research on Women's Health but will expand research on understudied conditions, strengthen inclusion of women in clinical trials, and increase accountability for considering sex as a biological variable, according to an NIH spokesperson.
- Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff and recent breast cancer patient, will lead the task force, whose members include HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, acting FDA commissioner Kyle Diamantas, and newly confirmed CDC director Erica Schwartz.
- Women's health research has been a flashpoint since Trump returned to the White House: the word "women" in grants triggered special NIH reviews and academic research was "paralyzed" by funding slashes and efforts to eliminate diversity mentions, the source notes.
- HHS will cover the task force's administrative costs, but funding details for the new NIH division were not disclosed in Monday's order.
- The underlying neglect is documented: women are seven times as likely as men to have a heart condition misdiagnosed or be sent home from the hospital during a heart attack, per a landmark 2000 study cited in the article, and a 2025 Science Advances review found women face greater risk of adverse drug reactions and less effective chronic pain treatment.
Why it matters: The order sits in direct tension with the administration's own actions: while creating a marquee women's health initiative fronted by the first lady, the source notes NIH has been flagging grants containing the word "women" for special review and slashing research funding — meaning the very researchers the new division would coordinate may already be operating in what one Yale physician called "the blast zone of 'gender ideology.'"
Ask SkimNews
