White House orders health institutes to create women's health division

The President signed Executive Order 14437 on 19 October 2026, directing the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a Women’s Health Division within the National Institutes of Health within 90 days. The order, titled “Advancing Women’s Health To Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life,” was published in the Federal Register of 22 October 2026 (Vol. 91, No. 203, pp. 66779–66782) as document 2026–21666. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, acting through the NIH Director, must place the new division inside “an appropriate institute or center.”

The text argues that “many diseases and conditions that disproportionately or uniquely affect women have not received the level of research, clinical attention, and treatment that other diseases and conditions have received.” It sets a policy of translating research into clinical care across “infancy, childhood, and adolescence through pregnancy, midlife, menopause, and aging,” and states that implementation is subject to the availability of appropriations. The order also revokes two earlier actions: Executive Order 14120 of 18 March 2024 (Advancing Women’s Health Research and Innovation) and the Presidential Memorandum of 13 November 2023 (White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research).

Seven duties for the new division

Working with the existing NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health, the division is assigned a list of tasks:

• Increase scientific review of women’s health conditions that remain understudied or insufficiently understood.
• Advance and coordinate research at all phases of life, including replication studies.
• Promote advanced research technologies to shorten time to diagnosis and widen access to prevention, treatment and personalized medicine.
• Strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration in basic and clinical research.
• Support data-collection and research methods that improve understanding of sex-specific outcomes and increase inclusion of women and girls in clinical trials.
• Develop accountability for grant recipients to enforce adherence to the NIH policy requiring research to account for sex as a biological variable.
• Facilitate translation of discoveries into clinical practice and public health implementation across federal, state and local jurisdictions.

The order names the conditions it considers neglected, among them cardiovascular and heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s Disease, autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, osteoporosis, mental health, chronic pain, endometriosis, fibroids, polyendocrine metabolic ovary syndrome, infertility, maternal health, menopause, neurological disorders and aging.

A task force co-chaired at the White House

Section 3 creates the White House Women’s Health Task Force, co-chaired by the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff. Beyond the co-chairs, its members are:

• The Secretary of War, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
• The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs.
• The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
• The Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, plus other officials invited at the co-chairs’ discretion.

The co-chairs may hold public hearings, meetings and roundtables and take expert input from academia, industry and philanthropy. The Department of Health and Human Services must fund the task force’s administrative costs, and the department also bears the cost of publishing the order.

Grantmaking and pilot programmes

The task force is told to prioritise grantmaking on prevention, treatment and long-term health, and to advise agency heads on pilot programmes that “improve incentives to integrate prevention, early intervention, and treatment and remove obsolete silos between agencies, programs, or systems.” It is also to consult states, tribal nations, local jurisdictions, community and faith-based organisations, the private sector and philanthropic entities on moving research into practice. The order carries standard language stating that it creates no enforceable right or benefit and does not impair the budgetary functions of the Office of Management and Budget.

The 90-day clock makes the division the most immediate deliverable, but the order’s reach is wider: it rewires how the federal government reviews women’s health grants, ties funding accountability to the sex-as-a-biological-variable policy, and puts a cabinet-level coordinating body over agencies from health to agriculture, labour and veterans affairs. For researchers and grant recipients, the practical effect is a new reviewer, new reporting expectations and a stated preference for prevention and translation work.

Source: Federal Register, Vol. 91, No. 203, 22 October 2026, Presidential Documents, p. 66779 (official reference: 2026–21666).