One signature in the Rose Garden created a new federal women’s health division and wiped out the White House initiative Jill Biden led.
President Donald Trump signed the executive order Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, at a Rose Garden ceremony with First Lady Melania Trump beside him. It gives the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 90 days to create a Women’s Health Division and sets up a White House task force, co-led by the health and human services secretary and the White House chief of staff, to coordinate federal work on women’s health.
“Beginning today we will change the reality of women’s health,” Melania Trump said. She helped shape the order and the task force in consultation with physicians, White House officials, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the president, after a series of meetings with federal health officials.
The Billion Dollars Behind the Old Order
The order does not only build. It revokes a March 2024 executive order on advancing women’s health research that Jill Biden championed as first lady, along with the November 2023 memorandum that created the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which she led.
Jill Biden had been mourning the rollback for months. Asked on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, about watching 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.” She has not publicly responded to the Oct. 19 order.
That initiative had drawn nearly $1 billion in federal funding — not one pot of money, but commitments and investments spread across agencies. NIH pledged $200 million. ARPA-H accounted for $100 million. The Defense Department announced a $500 million commitment. The Biden administration also asked Congress for a $12 billion women’s health research fund, a request lawmakers never approved.
Trump’s order sets no funding target of its own. It directs the Department of Health and Human Services to cover the task force’s administrative costs and says the work is subject to available appropriations.
A Co-Chair Just Out of Treatment
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who recently completed treatment for breast cancer, will run the task force alongside Kennedy. The panel was set to meet for the first time Monday, Oct. 19, the same day the president signed. Its roster pulls in officials from the Agriculture, Labor, Education and Veterans Affairs departments, NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the co-chairs may seek input from researchers, health professionals, community organizations, states, tribal nations and private-sector groups.
The new division will sit inside an NIH institute or center and work with the agency’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, established in 1990. It is directed to review research on understudied conditions, coordinate work across women’s life stages and improve the inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials. The order also calls for stronger accountability in applying NIH’s existing policy requiring researchers to consider sex as a biological variable.
The research areas it names run from heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease to autoimmune conditions, osteoporosis, mental health, chronic pain, endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, maternal health and menopause — needs that span infancy and childhood through pregnancy, midlife and aging. The White House says the point is better coordination and faster translation of research into clinical care, with the division helping move findings into prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
A Detour to the Rose Garden Patio
Trump called the signing a historic action and praised his wife’s work, saying she had accomplished a great deal. Then he veered off script into White House renovations, including the patio stone that now covers what was once the Rose Garden lawn.
Back on the subject of women’s health, he said he had been surprised that some of the order’s requirements were not already in place, recalling that he had asked Melania Trump whether the government really lacked such a division.
“Who the hell wouldn’t have a women’s health division?” he said.
Where the Independent Women Went
Melania Trump’s new assignment adds a dimension to a portfolio that in her husband’s second term has centered on improving foster care systems and expanding access to technology and artificial intelligence in education. In his first presidency, her signature effort was Be Best, which focused on child well-being, safe social media use and reducing drug abuse.
The ceremony landed weeks before the Nov. 3 elections and as Trump’s job approval has slipped, including among women. About 4 in 10 independent women supported him during the 2024 election against Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP-NORC polls. By the opening months of 2026, that figure had fallen to around a quarter.