On May 21, more than 100 advocates—founders, physicians, investors, researchers, and patients—descended on the Rayburn House Office Building with a message Congress cannot ignore: The House health appropriations bill is being written right now, and women’s health cannot be an afterthought again. They came from nearly 25 states, representing a network of approximately 5,000 advocates in all 50. Women’s Health Advocates, the nation’s only bipartisan lobbying organization advancing all aspects of women’s health, organized the convening.
Women are 50.5% of the U.S. population, yet less than 9% of NIH grant spending goes to women’s health research—a share that has declined even as the NIH budget has grown. Women live longer than men but in measurably poorer health. This is not a data gap. It is a policy failure.
The Clock Is Running Out—And Everyone Knows It
The timing is deliberate. “The Women’s Health Congressional Briefing could not be better timed as decisions on funding and policy are happening now,” explains Liz Powell, founder of Women’s Health Advocates and G2G Consulting. “The House health funding measure is being written right now.”
That urgency is not rhetorical. In April 2025, the Trump administration’s mandate to cut NIH contracts by 35%—$2.6 billion—put the Women’s Health Initiative on the chopping block, threatening to shut down the regional centers collecting longitudinal data from 42,000 women. Researchers and advocates pushed back hard enough to force a reversal within days, but the broader damage was real. NIH grant cancellations in 2025 disproportionately hit women researchers, and a Washington Post analysis found a 31% drop in grants with the word “women” in them. The research environment for women’s health remains volatile.
The moment is also political. With midterm elections six months out, members of Congress in persuadable districts are more responsive to constituent pressure than at any other point in the legislative cycle. One hundred advocates from nearly 25 states walking the halls of Congress are not a lobby day. They are a constituency demonstrating its size.
Seven Asks. One Architecture Problem
Women’s Health Advocates arrived with a specific policy platform targeting every point in the pipeline where the system fails women, from the lab bench to the exam room to the insurance claim.
On research funding, the asks are four:
- $200 million for an interdisciplinary women’s health research fund across NIH institutes
- $115 million for the Office of Research on Women’s Health
- $5 million for the NIH Menopause Research Into Action Network
- $10 million for Women Warfighter Health and Readiness research within the Department of Defense
The $5 million menopause ask may be the most consequential per dollar on the list. Women lose up to 20% of their bone density in the first five to seven years post-menopause—a cascade that drives fracture rates, hospitalizations, and long-term care costs that dwarf the research investment. Half of all American women over 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis in their lifetime. Osteoporotic fractures are responsible for more hospitalizations than heart attacks, strokes, and breast cancer combined, at $400,000 per hip fracture patient per year in care costs. Meanwhile, Medicare payment rates for bone density tests have been cut by 70%, resulting in 2.3 million fewer women being tested.
“More than half the population of the U.S. are women and improving their health at midlife and reducing the burden of disease in women as they age will have a huge impact on our economy and our healthcare system,” notes Claire Gill, founder and president of the National Menopause Foundation. “Research and support on the menopause transition is an inflection point that can have a dramatic impact to improve health, save lives, improve workplace productivity, and prevent long-term health implications. It should be a no-brainer.”
The Study of Women Across the Nation—tracking women longitudinally for decades, with participants now in their 70s—recently failed to receive the NIH funding investigators requested. It will continue, Gill acknowledges, but without enough support “to do rigorous science to get the full benefit of knowledge we need.”
Three additional asks round out the WHA agenda.
- The Find It Early Act would guarantee all women access to early breast cancer screening technologies at zero co-pay—up to half of all women have dense breast tissue, a condition that renders standard mammograms unable to detect cancer, and they are currently charged for the supplemental imaging they require.
- Reimbursement reform would equalize CMS valuations for procedures performed on female and male patients: more than 100 codes for surgeries on female anatomy are reimbursed an average of 30% lower than comparable procedures on male anatomy, with some gaps reaching 150%.
- Finally, a Women’s Health Innovation Pilot within the FDA would accelerate bringing women’s health technologies to patients through a regulatory pathway not designed with women at the center.
The Representatives Showing Up For Women’s Health
Congress did not need to be convinced to listen. Several members showed up to say they already agree—and that the window to act is now.
“Women’s health has been underfunded, understudied, and underestimated for far too long. That ends now,” argues Rep. Yassamin Ansari, U.S. Representative for Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District. The youngest woman currently serving in Congress, Ansari introduced the HER Agenda on the final day of Women’s History Month to ensure Congress “finally treats women’s pain as a policy priority, not an afterthought.” The package addresses gynecological pain management, paid leave for reproductive health conditions, and NIH research into Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder—a condition affecting up to 7.7% of women of reproductive age that is routinely misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder.
Rep. Debbie Dingell fought in the 1990s to require women’s inclusion in federally funded research and co-introduced the bipartisan Advancing Women’s Health Coverage Act to modernize post-mastectomy insurance coverage. From fiscal year 2003 to 2020, the Office of Research on Women’s Health budget grew by just $4 million.
Rep. Kelly Morrison—an OB-GYN for more than 20 years and the first and only pro-choice OB-GYN ever to serve in Congress—introduced the BABIES Act to expand Medicaid access to birth centers in a country where one in 12 women live in a maternity-care desert. “Conversations like this one make it possible for us to work together to ensure Congress prioritizes women’s health, from reproductive health access to menopause care research,” Morrison notes. “I’m grateful to Women’s Health Advocates for this opportunity to hear directly from the people engaging in this critically important work and I look forward to continuing to explore more opportunities to improve women’s health care.”
Representative Sara Jacobs of California’s 51st Congressional District cut to the sharpest edge of the access argument at Women’s Health Week in New York on May 14. “The information you leave behind in period and fertility tracking apps, ride sharing apps, search engines, browsing history, location data, and more can be sold and shared without your consent with advertisers, data brokers or even law enforcement,” Jacobs warns. The post-Dobbs era has transformed what was once a consumer privacy nuisance into a legal liability—and existing federal law offers women no meaningful protection.
A Mandate With A Deadline
Women’s Health Advocates has grown from 90 advocates representing 15 states at its first Capitol Hill Day in May 2025 to more than 100 from nearly 25 states in year two, with a network reaching all 50. “Congress has the power to address these issues,” Powell adds, “and now, has the mandate from constituents to take action.”
The appropriations bill being drafted right now will either reflect that mandate or it won’t.
