First lady Melania Trump’s new initiative to advance research in women’s health has some women’s health researchers scratching their heads.
The Trump administration’s approach to federal grant funding and demographic-specific research — including freezing billions in health research funds and banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs — has taken a toll on those doing the very work the Trump administration now says it wants to prioritize, these researchers said.
“I have a whole lab of junior investigators and early-career investigators that I mentor, and some of them left academia feeling very discouraged that their research would not get funded or that they could not have a career in this area,” said Dr. Crystal Schiller, who leads a lab at the University of North Carolina studying women’s neuroscience. “And that was very disheartening.”
Schiller said she’s still “very happy” to see the administration identify women’s health research as a priority.
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Melania Trump’s new initiative and President Donald Trump’s coinciding executive order establishing a White House women’s health task force and a women’s health division at the National Institutes of Health, expressed a “commitment to advancing women’s health and ensuring that medical research, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment reflect the highest quality of scientific evidence.”
The administration’s slash-and-burn approach to federal funding, however, is still fresh on many researchers’ minds. Research around women’s health was particularly hard hit, according to Dr. Jane Salmon, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.
“We lost people to industry. We admitted fewer students because of lab resource losses and insecurity about supporting [students],” Salmon said. “There was an environment of no security. It created a culture of anxiety and a low threshold for departures.”
The Trump administration has laid off thousands of federal public health workers and proposed cutting NIH’s budget by 12%. An analysis by the liberal think tank Center for American Program found the administration had eliminated at least $3 billion in women’s health research grants.
In March of 2025, NIH began canceling grants for research projects related to diversity, equity and inclusion. In the year that followed, the NIH saw a 31% decline in projects that included the word “women,” according to reporting from The Washington Post.
In a statement to The Sun, White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster said that improving health for Americans was a “top priority for President Trump and the First Lady” and that the new task force “will work to close critical research gaps and strengthen care for women across all stages of life.”
Researchers told The Washington Sun that women’s health has historically been underfunded and understudied, from a lack of inclusion in clinical trials to studying treatments for conditions that disproportionately or more severely affect women. In 2025, a consensus study report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended that Congress invest $11.4 billion into women’s health research over five years. The executive order from the Trump administration does not say how it will fund the investment it calls for.
“Any effort to increase attention to funding for those things is a good thing,” said Sheila Burke, a health care policy adviser and co-chair of the NASEM committee that authored the report. “The concern I had was there was no mention of money.”
The NIH already has an Office of Research on Women’s Health, but the office does not have its own research budget and must coordinate across all 27 of the agency’s institutes.
Former first lady Jill Biden also formed a White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research during her tenure. The initiative was followed by an executive order from President Joe Biden saying “we know far too little about women’s health across women’s lifespans.”
Unlike the Trump administration’s task force, the Biden administration’s order directed the head of the Office of Management and Budget to participate in its task force, implying that the initiative would be considered in budget talks. The Trump-defined task force does not include the head of OMB.
The Biden administration did not secure a congressional budget for women’s health research at the NIH. Katie Keith, former deputy director of the White House Gender Policy Council who oversaw Jill Biden’s initiative, said that the Biden Women’s Health Initiative pooled resources across government agencies and was “able to galvanize almost a billion dollars ourselves.”
Keith said that the Biden initiative worked with the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and several other agencies not named in the Trump executive order. These agencies experienced significant staffing and funding losses in DOGE cuts.
“Watching all those cuts and having entire divisions that worked on women’s health-related issues, in some instances, be gutted I think was a huge setback to this effort that they say they now want to prioritize,” Keith said.
The Biden initiative was led by Dr. Carolyn Mazure, a professor of psychiatry and founding director of the Women’s Health Research group at Yale School of Medicine.
Trump’s task force will be co-chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Trump said that his motivation for announcing an investment in women’s health was inspired by Melania Trump. In the White House Rose Garden, Trump said, “When I heard about it, I said, ‘Are you sure they don’t have that?’ Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?”
The NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health was established in 1993 and makes up less than half a percent of the agency’s budget.
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