Trump Administration Cancels Funding for Women’s Health Initiative

On April 21, 2025, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) announced that the contracts supporting its four regional centers will be terminated in September by the Trump administration and that the program’s clinical coordinating center “will continue operations until January 2026, after which time its funding remains uncertain.”

WHI is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative that has run for over three decades, enrolling tens of thousands of participants in clinical trials and tracking the health of thousands more. It was the first and is still the largest NIH initiative focusing on women’s health, and currently enrolls about 42,000 participants. The cuts will prevent WHI researchers from continuing to work with this cohort and will significantly impact ongoing research and data collection.

Experts expressed concern over the negative implications for both current studies and the careers of early-stage scientists who rely on WHI’s resources. Garnet Anderson, a biostatistician who runs the WHI coordinating center, said that the program “was really meant as a makeup project for women, because women have been excluded from research for so many years.”

Update: On April 25, 2025, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that the cancellation of the WHI was “fake news.” An HHS spokesperson acknowledged that the cuts had been reversed and that “[t]hese studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health.”

Update: Following the HHS announcement, several WHI researchers told STAT News that they were still waiting for confirmation that funding had been restored, including the regional center at Ohio State University. The WHI coordinating center at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle also confirmed there was no update to regional center funding.