President Donald Trump has done something that even some of his fiercest critics should welcome. He has ordered the creation of a Women's Health Division at the National Institutes of Health, with first lady Melania Trump championing the initiative. We can acknowledge the awkwardness in welcoming this.
Trump has a contentious record on women's health, to say the least, and his administration has faced serious criticism over cuts to federal medical research. Yet the announcement addresses a longstanding failure of American medicine. Women have too often been diagnosed and treated according to evidence drawn primarily from men.
Washington has recognized this problem before. NIH established its Office of Research on Women's Health in 1990, and Joe Biden launched a White House women's health research initiative in 2023. So what makes Trump's effort different?
This administration wants to get research out of laboratories and into doctors' offices. A new NIH division would work alongside the existing women's health office, while a White House task force would try to make federal agencies work together. It is a sensible ambition, although anyone familiar with Washington's fondness for creating offices to coordinate other offices may reasonably reserve judgment.
We should also note that the initiative comes with no additional announced research funding. This is common territory for executive orders, which generally direct agencies to work with money Congress has already appropriated. Trump's order places the task force's administrative costs on the Department of Health and Human Services and makes implementation subject to available appropriations.
The money must therefore come from existing budgets unless Congress provides more. Nobody has yet specified how much the new division will receive or what other work might have to make room for it. Still, the absence of a new check is not a reason to dismiss the entire enterprise.
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