On April 21, Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) investigators were informed that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will terminate WHI Regional Center (RC) contracts at the end of the current fiscal year, in September 2025.
The Women’s Health Initiative is a landmark long-term national health study, launched by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Its research focuses on cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporotic fractures—leading causes of death and disability among older women. WHI’s vast, comprehensive data has enabled groundbreaking insights not only in these areas, but across a wide range of women’s health and aging research.
The sudden termination of contracts will severely disrupt ongoing studies and future data collection, threatening decades of progress. Without consistent infrastructure and data continuity, WHI’s ability to generate critical findings on older women’s health—one of the fastest-growing populations in the U.S.—will be drastically reduced.
The full scope of the damage is still being assessed, but the implications are clear: these cuts will have lasting, harmful consequences for research into the health and wellbeing of postmenopausal women.
“This was really meant as a makeup project for women, because women have been excluded from research for so many years,” said Garnet Anderson, a biostatistician who leads the WHI Coordinating Center.
Senator Patty Murray called the move “a devastating loss for women’s health research,” adding, “It’s unacceptable and truly tragic that the Trump administration has decided to pull the plug on one of the most influential studies in the world—one that has led to enormous breakthroughs in preventing chronic disease.”
Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which oversees the WHI programs, was given just one week to review 16,000 contracts to identify $2.6 billion in cuts—roughly 35% of its total. In response, NIH pleaded with Republican senators for a delay, warning that “there is no way to implement these cuts without damaging the NIH mission.” Among the terminated contracts: microscope maintenance, lab equipment, biospecimen storage, and nursing staff essential to clinical trials.
These cuts exemplify the Trump administration’s persistent disregard for women’s health. This isn’t just a budgetary decision—it’s a targeted rollback of progress made after decades of exclusion in medical research. WHI was created to correct that historic neglect. Dismantling it now would undo that work and send a chilling message about whose health matters.
The timing makes the hypocrisy even more glaring. While pushing policies aimed at encouraging women to have more children, the administration is simultaneously defunding the very research needed to keep those same women healthy. You cannot claim to value women and families while gutting the science that safeguards their long-term health.
If this decision stands, it will not only derail current studies—it will silence future discoveries and cost lives. Women deserve better. Science deserves better. And the American public deserves transparency and accountability when decisions of this magnitude are made.
