The two federal directives Jill Biden championed as first lady, the ones that made women’s health research her signature cause, no longer exist.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life” on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, at a Rose Garden ceremony, creating a new federal women’s health division and, with the same signature, erasing the White House initiative Biden led. First Lady Melania Trump stood beside him.
The order tells federal agencies to prioritize research into diseases uniquely or disproportionately affecting women, and it calls for increased collaboration with private-sector partners on new technologies, treatments and diagnostic tools. Trump revoked a March 2024 executive order on advancing women’s health research that Biden championed as first lady, along with a November 2023 memorandum that created the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which she led.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has 90 days to create a Women’s Health Division, placed inside an NIH institute or center.
Sex as a Biological Variable
The new division will work with the agency’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, established in 1990. The order directs it to review research on understudied conditions, coordinate across women’s life stages and improve the inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials. It also calls for stronger accountability in applying NIH’s existing policy, which requires researchers to consider sex as a biological variable.
The order names heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease; autoimmune conditions, osteoporosis, mental health and chronic pain; and endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, maternal health and menopause. Those needs span infancy and childhood through pregnancy, midlife and aging. The White House said the point is better coordination and faster translation of research into clinical care, with the division moving findings into prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
A Division Without a Dollar Figure
Biden’s initiative drew nearly $1 billion in federal funding, though that sum was never one pot of money — it was commitments and investments spread across agencies. The NIH pledged $200 million and ARPA-H $100 million, while a $500 million commitment came from the Defense Department. Congress never approved the $12 billion women’s health research fund the Biden administration requested.
Trump’s order sets no funding target of its own. The Department of Health and Human Services must cover the task force’s administrative costs under the order, whose language makes the work subject to available appropriations.
From Be Best to Biotechnology
Melania Trump helped shape both the order and the task force. After a series of meetings with federal health officials, she consulted the president, physicians, White House officials and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Beginning today we will change the reality of women’s health,” she said. She continued: “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.”
The assignment adds a dimension to a second-term portfolio built on improving foster care systems and expanding access to technology and artificial intelligence in education. Her signature effort in the first presidency, Be Best, focused on child well-being, safe social media use and reducing drug abuse.
Kennedy will run the task force alongside White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who recently completed treatment for breast cancer. The order makes the health and human services secretary and the White House chief of staff its co-leads. The first meeting was set for Monday, Oct. 19, the same day as the signing. The roster includes officials from the Agriculture, Labor, Education and Veterans Affairs departments, plus the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Experts in women’s health, technology, academia, the private sector and philanthropy may be asked to advise the co-chairs.
Speaking after his wife, Trump said the order will “promote new research and really go after the understudied diseases affecting women.” He called the action historic and praised her work, saying she had accomplished a great deal, then went off script into White House renovations and the patio stone now covering what was once the Rose Garden lawn. Back on women’s health, he said he was surprised 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.
What Jill Biden Called Heartbreaking
Jill Biden has made no public response to the Oct. 19 order. Months before it, MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” asked her on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, what it was like to watch her husband’s work undone. 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.”
The ceremony came weeks before the Nov. 3 elections, with Trump’s job approval slipping, including among women. AP-NORC polls found that about 4 in 10 independent women backed him in the 2024 election against Democrat Kamala Harris. That figure had fallen to around a quarter by the opening months of 2026, a period marked by his immigration crackdown in U.S. cities and the opening weeks of the Iran war.
