A single signature from President Donald Trump wiped out the women’s health initiative Jill Biden built as first lady and replaced it with a new federal division carrying no money of its own.
Trump signed the executive order on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, at a Rose Garden ceremony with First Lady Melania Trump standing beside him, creating a women’s health division inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and revoking the White House initiative his predecessor’s wife led.
The order, titled “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life,” gives NIH 90 days to stand up a Women’s Health Division. It also establishes a White House task force to coordinate federal work on women’s health, with the health and human services secretary and the White House chief of staff serving as co-leads.
It directs federal agencies to prioritize research into diseases that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, and it calls for increased collaboration with private-sector partners on new technologies, treatments and diagnostic tools.
The Two Directives He Revoked
Two directives fell with the signature. One was a March 2024 executive order on advancing women’s health research that Jill Biden had championed as first lady; the other was the November 2023 memorandum establishing the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research she led.
Federal agencies had steered nearly $1 billion toward that initiative, though the total represented commitments and investments spread across government rather than one pot of money. NIH pledged $200 million and ARPA-H accounted for $100 million. The Defense Department announced a $500 million commitment, and the Biden administration went further, asking Congress for a $12 billion women’s health research fund that lawmakers never approved.
A Division With No Funding Target
No funding target appears anywhere in Trump’s order. The Department of Health and Human Services is instead directed to cover the task force’s administrative costs, and the work is made subject to available appropriations.
An NIH institute or center will house the new division, which is to work with the agency’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, established in 1990. Its assignments under the order include reviewing research on understudied conditions, coordinating work across women’s life stages and improving the inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials. It also calls for stronger accountability under NIH’s existing policy requiring researchers to consider sex as a biological variable.
The order names heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune conditions, osteoporosis, mental health, chronic pain, endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, maternal health and menopause as research areas. Those needs span infancy and childhood through pregnancy, midlife and aging. The White House frames the goal as better coordination and faster translation of research into clinical care, with the division helping move findings into prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will run the task force alongside White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who recently completed treatment for breast cancer. The panel was set to meet for the first time Monday, Oct. 19, the same day as the signing. Joining the co-chairs are officials from NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Agriculture, Labor, Education and Veterans Affairs departments. The co-chairs may seek input from researchers, health professionals, community organizations, states, tribal nations and private-sector groups.
A Detour to the Patio Stone
Melania Trump said at the ceremony, “Beginning today we will change the reality of women’s health,” and described the country as entering “a transformative moment for women in America,” citing advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and medical science. She added: “Previous generations fought for women’s rights. Our generation will fight to discover the cures that will ensure a woman can live her life in health and to the fullest.”
Trump spoke after his wife, calling the signing a historic action and praising her work, saying she had accomplished a great deal. The order, he said, will “promote new research and really go after the understudied diseases affecting women,” and he said it is also intended to promote diagnostic technology and improve treatment.
Then he veered off script, onto White House renovations, including the patio stone now covering what was once the Rose Garden lawn. Back on women’s health, he said he was surprised that some of the order’s requirements were not already in place and recalled asking Melania Trump whether the government really lacked such a division. “Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?” he said.
Melania Trump helped shape the order and the task force in consultation with physicians, White House officials, Kennedy and the president, after a series of meetings with federal health officials. Her second-term portfolio has centered on improving foster care systems and expanding access to technology and artificial intelligence in education, and the new assignment adds a dimension to it. In her husband’s first presidency, her signature effort was Be Best, focused on child well-being, safe social media use and reducing drug abuse.
What Jill Biden Called Heartbreaking
Jill Biden had lamented cuts to women’s health research months earlier. MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” asked her on Tuesday, June 2, how it felt to watch her husband’s work undone, and she pointed to cuts to women’s health funding: “the research money for women’s health — something that I’m really interested in — it’s heartbreaking.” She has made no public response to the Oct. 19 order.
The ceremony came weeks before the Nov. 3 elections, with Trump’s job approval slipping, including among women. Independent women backed him at a rate of about 4 in 10 during the 2024 election against Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP-NORC polls, a share that fell to around a quarter in the opening months of 2026, a period that included Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown in U.S. cities and the opening weeks of the Iran war.
