On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order on women's health, with First Lady Melania Trump at his side. The order instructs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a Women's Health Division within 90 days. It also sets up a White House task force, co-chaired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The order's only funding line has the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cover the task force's administrative costs. NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told CBS News that "some new money will very likely be devoted to this,” but he couldn't say how much.

Last November, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) moved to drop most of the black box warning on menopause hormone therapy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the leading professional group for OB-GYNs, had "long encouraged" a second look for low-dose vaginal estrogen, which barely reaches the bloodstream. 

Former safety monitors for the Women's Health Initiative, the trials behind the warning, agreed that it was time to reassess, but objected to the process. The FDA held a two-hour panel with no open public hearing. And once the warning came off, more women sought hormone therapy, and estrogen patches ran short.

Several items on the HHS list of accomplishments don't hold up.

The press release points to the HHS Perinatal Improvement Collaborative. In April, Secretary Kennedy told senators the program had cut maternal mortality by 42% in one year. According to the program's annual update, deaths during the delivery hospital stay fell 42% at participating hospitals between 2019 and 2024, while they fell 6% at comparison hospitals. The report warns that the gap may reflect "selection effects." The hospitals that joined may have had more room to improve, stronger leadership support or more readiness for change than the comparison hospitals did. If so, some of that drop would have happened without the program. Severe complications among mothers held steady. The analysis covers 200 deaths across 2.6 million deliveries. The program began in 2020, during President Trump's first term. Every year in the analysis ended before his second term began.

Maternal mortality, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) measures it, counts deaths through 42 days after pregnancy, wherever they happen. The national rate was 17.9 per 100,000 births in 2024, about the same as in 2023.

The release counts "more than $525 million" for home visiting. Congress scheduled that money in 2022, when it renewed the program through 2027.

It says HHS is "proposing" to let women collect their own cervical cancer screening sample, although the Health Resources and Services Administration, part of HHS, finalized that guideline last December.

The press release also describes a proposed fertility benefit from HHS, Labor, and Treasury as focused on “non-IVF treatments,“ but the rule would let employers offer fertility coverage as an optional add-on, capped at $120,000 per person, and it lists IVF as a covered treatment.

And Section 5 of the order, which the press release skips over, revokes President Biden’s 2024 executive order on women’s health research. The White House said it wanted to move the effort beyond research and into clinical care, but the new order also drops Biden’s instruction to find the gaps in federal funding for women’s health research.

A Washington Post analysis found a 31% drop in funded NIH projects in 2025 that included the word "women." HHS blamed grant delays on last year's government shutdown.

The White House also asked to cut NIH's budget by 43% this year. Congress refused. It gave the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health $30 million more instead.

In April 2025, HHS laid off most of the CDC's reproductive health division. That included the entire team behind the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a survey of new mothers in 46 states. It also included the eight people who kept up the CDC's contraception guidelines, whose app doctors had downloaded 440,000 times. On October 8th, Senator Maggie Hassan told Secretary Kennedy that HHS still hasn't restored PRAMS.

In June, HHS canceled 53 of 67 teen pregnancy prevention grants, and in August a federal judge blocked the abstinence-only rules HHS wrote for the replacement grants. The judge noted that HHS's funding notice cited research papers that don't exist.

That same month, a coalition of states led by New York sued over new conditions on Title X, the federal family planning program. The states say the conditions push clinics to discourage contraception in favor of natural family planning. Next year's White House budget would eliminate Title X altogether, along with the CDC program that pays for PRAMS.

PRAMS tells states which mothers skipped prenatal care, had symptoms of postpartum depression, or lost insurance after the baby came. States use those answers to decide where to send help. Without the survey, HHS ends up grading itself by comparing a hospital program's 2019 to 2024 numbers.

Congress has funded the government through December 11th, and its next spending bill will decide whether the new division gets money and whether PRAMS and Title X survive. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who pressed Secretary Kennedy in April on the drop in women's health research, chairs the Senate committee that writes it. Meanwhile, the NIH has until January 17th to decide where to put the new division.

Creating that new division is a start. But the true test will be whether women get more answers and better care — and the sustained investment that both of those require.

Dr. Céline Gounder is a physician, epidemiologist, and medical journalist. She's a CBS News medical correspondent and the Editor-at-Large for Public Health at KFF Health News. You can read her newsletter, Underlying Conditions, here.