President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, meant to expand federal research into women’s health, an effort first lady Melania Trump championed, according to The Associated Press. The Trumps signed the order together at a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House.
The Trump women’s health executive order creates a Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House Women’s Health Task Force focused on women’s health, Reuters reported. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will co-chair the task force.
What the Trump women’s health executive order directs
The order gives the Department of Health and Human Services 90 days to set up the new division inside an existing NIH institute or center. It won’t replace the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health, which has existed since 1990. Instead, the two will work together, and the White House says the division will have a mandate that reaches beyond research.
The order calls for more research into maternal health, mental health and endometriosis, along with infertility, fibroids and menopause, the AP reported. HHS will cover the task force’s administrative costs, but the order doesn’t set specific funding goals.
The first lady said she developed the plan with input from physicians, White House officials, Kennedy and her husband, according to the AP. In a statement before the signing, she said the gaps in medical research for women needed urgent attention. “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,” she said.
At the ceremony, she framed the order as a turning point. “Beginning today we will change the reality of women’s health,” she said, according to the AP. On X, she laid out five priorities: steering research money toward conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, using artificial intelligence to speed up discoveries, getting promising treatments to women faster, making breakthroughs affordable and opening up conversations about women’s health that have long been treated as taboo.
Trump credited his wife with the idea for the division. “Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?” he said, recalling that she told him NIH didn’t have one, the AP reported.
What it means for women’s health research
The new NIH division gives women’s health research a dedicated institutional home with a higher profile inside the agency, working alongside the office that already exists. Pairing it with a task force led by two of the administration’s most senior officials, Wiles and Kennedy, signals the White House wants direct oversight of how the initiative moves forward. The task force held its first meeting Monday, right after the signing.
Melania Trump met several times with federal health officials before the order came together, the AP reported. The issue also widens her policy portfolio. During Trump’s second term, she has focused largely on young people in foster care and on artificial intelligence in education, including the Presidential AI Challenge.
Background
The order lands at a notable moment for the administration’s health policy. Trump’s administration has pushed for health care cuts, including at NIH, and moved last year to downsize the federal health care workforce, Reuters reported. It has also sought to cut NIH grants for research on diversity-related topics. Some critics have questioned how much the new order can accomplish after thousands of NIH layoffs, Al Jazeera reported.
The order also revokes former President Joe Biden’s March 2024 executive order on women’s health research, which then-first lady Jill Biden championed, along with a November 2023 memo that created a White House initiative on the issue.
Wiles, who will co-lead the new task force, recently announced she is cancer-free after treatment for breast cancer. Trump noted the order arrived during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
What’s next
HHS now has 90 days to stand up the NIH division. The order doesn’t include a budget or specific funding targets, and the administration hasn’t said how large the division will be or which research projects it will tackle first.
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