Melania Trump, the first lady, made a rare Rose Garden appearance on Monday to announce a new White House initiative to advance women’s health, two weeks before a midterm election in which polls show that just one-third of American women express support for President Trump and the Republican Party.
The initiative, outlined in an executive order issued by Mr. Trump, will include a new Division of Women’s Health within the National Institutes of Health, and a new Women’s Health Task force within the White House.
But the N.I.H. already has an Office of Research on Women’s Health, created in 1990 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and it is unclear whether the Trump administration is putting any money behind the new division. Officials said the division would not replace the original office but would collaborate with it.
“Our mission must serve women at every stage of life, from young girls just starting out to mothers dealing with a complex range of responsibilities, to mature women who deserve to have vitality, dignity and independence,” Mrs. Trump said as the president looked on.
Women’s organizations and patient groups have been clamoring for years for the federal government to spend more on women’s health. Some said the executive order would accomplish little without new funding from Congress.
The Trump administration has already done an about-face on women’s health research. In April of last year, a few months after Mr. Trump took office, the Department of Health and Human Services decided to slash funding for the Women’s Health Initiative, a long-running, taxpayer-funded study of a broad range of women’s health issues that began in the 1990s.
But officials restored the money after a public outcry. “These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” Emily G. Hilliard, a department spokeswoman, said at the time.
Mr. Trump, who spoke after the first lady, called the announcement “a big deal” and credited himself with doing something new. “When I heard about it, I said, ‘Are you sure they don’t have that?’” the president said. “Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?”
Some women’s health groups said that Congress should establish a women’s health research institute within the N.I.H., not merely a division housed within another institute, as this one will be. A 2024 report from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine called for elevating the N.I.H.’s Office on Research and Women’s Health to the level of an institute so that it could fund research initiatives on women’s health across the life span.
That report also called for substantially increasing funding on women’s health. It noted that only 9 percent of N.I.H. research spending between 2013 and 2023 focused on women’s health research, and that funding had decreased as a share of overall spending as the N.I.H. budget increased.
Several women’s health organizations, including the Society for Women’s Health Research and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, issued a joint statement saying they welcomed the announcement.
But the statement said, “Robust and sustained funding is necessary to meaningfully advance research in women’s health and improve health outcomes in all phases of women’s lives.” It added: “We look forward to advancing a coordinated, comprehensive approach to improving women’s health across the life span and ensuring that this effort is appropriately resourced.”
The coalition has called for a $20 billion investment in improving women’s health over the next 10 years through research, education and the clinical work force
Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had his own executive order and Women’s Health Initiative, but the new executive order revoked both of them. In 2023, Mr. Biden issued a presidential memorandum that charged every federal agency engaged in health research to develop a plan for advancing women’s health research. The next year, he asked Congress to make a “bold, transformative investment” of $12 billion to fund his initiative.
Alina Salganicoff, the co-chairwoman of the committee that produced the 2024 National Academy of Medicine report, questioned how the new division would set research priorities, and wondered whether it would end up focusing on the interests of the Make America Healthy Again movement, like nonhormonal approaches to contraception and fertility awareness, for example.
“If you have a fixed amount of money and you’re going to invest in new research, what are the trade-offs — what are you not funding in order to fund these new studies?” said Ms. Salganicoff, who now directs the Women’s Health Policy Program at the nonprofit health research organization KFF.
Carolee Lee, the chief executive and founder of Women’s Health Access Matters, or WHAM, a nonprofit focused on diseases that disproportionately, differently or exclusively affect women, said she welcomed the spotlight on women’s health across all stages of life.
“Most people define women’s health as reproductive or maternal health,” Ms. Lee said, “but that’s only 5 percent of the conditions that affect women in their lifetime — the other 95 percent is everything else, from autoimmune diseases and Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease.”
The president said the task force would meet later in the afternoon. It will be chaired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, who was recently treated for breast cancer. Mr. Trump’s executive order called for the new N.I.H. division to be created within 90 days.
