President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order aiming to bolster women’s health by targeting research, prevention, diagnosis and treatment. The order includes creation of a Women’s Health Task Force, as well as a new Women’s Health Division inside the National Institutes of Health.

The task force will be headed by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The task force was to hold its first meeting late Monday.

The division will coordinate with the existing Office of Research on Women’s Health, which was established in 1990, according to Reuters.

The order was nudged along by first lady Melania Trump, who has championed women’s health initiatives, including a “First Lady’s Five Pillars of Women’s Health Innovation,” according to a news release from her office. Those pillars include:

• Direct research funding to find cures for illnesses that affect women in a unique way.

• Use of super intelligence to “enhance insight of female biology and speed up medical discoveries.”

• Speeding up the pathway from lab to patients for promising therapeutics, while practicing strict safety standards.

• Making sure breakthroughs are affordable and available to women in all income brackets.

• “Replacing generations of silence with open conversation, education and compassion.”

In joining the president to announce the order, Melania Trump said, “The Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life Executive Order establishes a new standard for women’s health in America.”

The goal, she added, is to reinvent healthcare for women.

“We now possess extraordinary scientific capabilities, such as super intelligence, advanced biotechnology and groundbreaking therapies. At the same time, social norms are changing, and topics that were once taboo are becoming open, well-informed, and necessary, she said.

The first lady also highlighted the importance of serving women “at every stage of life, from young girls just starting out to mothers dealing with a complex range of responsibilities to mature women who deserve to have vitality, dignity and independence.”

USA Today reported that the first lady has been pressing her husband for the boost to women’s health. “The initiative comes amid a flurry of meetings set up by the first lady herself inside the East Wing including working sessions with physicians and other experts in the public and private sectors. She met with officials from Health and Human Services to establish the task force.”

Conditions affecting women

A White House fact sheet notes that “while previous administrations have invested in women’s health research, the Trump administration is enhancing, streamlining and elevating federal efforts regarding both research and its translation into health solutions.” It said that many of the diseases that disproportionately or uniquely affect women “have not received the level of research, clinical attention and treatment that other diseases and conditions have received.”

Among those conditions that “uniquely or disproportionately affect women” are cardiovascular disease, cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, chronic pain, endometriosis, fibroids, polyendocrine metabolic ovary syndrome (formerly called polycystic ovary syndrome or PCOS), infertility, maternal health, menopause, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis, according to a statement from the Department of Health and Human Services.

The order explicitly revokes former President Joe Biden’s March 2024 executive order on advancing women’s health research, and a November 2023 memorandum that created a White House initiative on women’s health.

The fact sheet also reports that in May, Trump launched Moms.gov as a resource for new and expecting mothers, with information “intended to help families navigate pregnancy and early parenthood.”

Task force makeup

Besides co-chairs Wiles and Kennedy, the task force members include the secretaries of war, labor, agriculture, education and veterans affairs, as well as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and “other members of my administration invited to participate at the discretion of the co-chairs,” per the executive order.

CBS reported that details of the funding for the new initiatives are not clear.