Dozens of women’s health advocates gathered for Women's Health Capitol Hill Day this week to educate lawmakers on the glaring gaps in research and treatment for women.
Ahead of the midterms and with the FY2027 appropriations process underway, the group hopes to advance several key priorities in the budget, engaging a dozen bipartisan members of Congress in meetings this week. The event was organized by Women’s Health Advocates (WHA), a rapidly growing bipartisan group that was founded by lobbyist Liz Powell. In 2025, it hosted what Powell says was the first-ever Women’s Health Capitol Hill Day.
“This thing is just growing like wildfire, and it’s this movement across the country. And women are realizing they have a voice and they can use it to make a difference,” Powell told Fierce Healthcare on Thursday at the event.
The group is requesting the following priorities:
- $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 & Readiness research within the Department of Defense
- The Find It Early Act: ensuring all women can access accurate early breast cancer screening with no copay
- CMS Reimbursement Parity: addressing a system that reimburses more for the same procedures when performed on male patients
- FDA Women’s Health Innovation Pilot: a dedicated pathway to accelerate the innovation cycle
Widespread NIH funding cuts under the Trump administration totaling over $2 billion have disproportionately impacted research for women’s health and female investigators. Congress members have taken notice.
“I’m tired of the fact that women’s health is consistently sidelined and treated as something only to be discussed behind closed doors,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told Fierce Healthcare in a statement. “This administration is dismantling programs and research to support women’s health. It’s outrageous and wrong.”
In remarks at a Congressional briefing organized by WHA, Rep. Kelly Morrison, M.D., D-Minn., formerly a practicing OBGYN, echoed Murray’s sentiment. “Recent policy changes cutting healthcare coverage and medical and scientific research are already combining with longstanding issues in the healthcare system to create huge issues in access and affordability,” Morrison said. She referred to this as a “catastrophe.”
For some, this is nothing new. “Women’s health research has been underfunded under every administration for the last 100 years,” Claire Gill, founder of the National Menopause Foundation and CEO of the National Osteoporosis Foundation, told Fierce Healthcare in a phone interview ahead of the event. “So while we are very much noticing the cuts to NIH now, and how awful they are, we were only ever less than 10% of the entire NIH budget.”
But the cuts are activating people, Gill said. Alongside other legislators, Murray recently reintroduced a bipartisan bill to boost menopause research and expand awareness around women’s mid-life health. “We’re 50% of the population and deserve to be taken seriously when we go to the doctor,” Murray told Fierce Healthcare, “that’s why I’ll never stop fighting to make sure we make women’s health a federal priority.”
“The fact that we are finding senators willing to reintroduce legislation that didn’t make it through the last session is incredibly important,” Gill noted. “Those coalitions are getting bigger, stronger and louder.”
Morrison is a proponent of early interventions that save lives and lower costs, she said in her remarks at the briefing, such as expanding Medicaid to 12 months postpartum. She also spoke about the importance of supporting the healthcare workforce as they deal with administrative burdens, burnout and misinformation. She called for simplifying the visa process for trained health professionals to help meet high demand, investing in mental health for healthcare workers to reduce burnout, and updating outdated policies that disincentivize specialties in medicine.
“I feel hopeful,” Morrison concluded. “The workforce needed to meet women’s health needs can exist, if we have the willingness to invest in it.”
“Across the board, women’s health needs to be addressed better in medical education,” Gill echoed in the phone interview. “We also have to support clinicians that are already in the field, who are already overworked, who have limited time [with patients.]” The National Menopause Foundation is currently working on a pilot program to train residents on menopause, per Gill, set to launch this summer.
The FDA also has a role to play in accelerating innovation, Nada Hanafi, founder of MedTech Strategy Advisors, told Fierce Healthcare at the event. Hanafi spent over a decade at the regulator. She believes the current moment demands clearer pathways and expectations around what evidence and endpoints are needed for women-focused R&D.
“There’s not enough clarity and there’s not enough communication or cross-talk between specialties,” Hanafi told Fierce Healthcare.
A lot of expertise and understanding of women’s health has been lost at the agency under the Trump administration, she added, delaying innovation. “They’re under-resourced, they’ve lost a lot of talent and the knowledge. … There’s a very bad sense of morale,” Hanafi said. “We’ve mixed policy with politics, and that's where things go wrong.”
To date, a total of 251 cardiovascular-related breakthrough device designations have been granted by the FDA, Hanafi pointed out. By contrast, only five obstetrics-related ones have. Whatever factors are driving this, the disparity is worth paying attention to. “Heart disease is a huge killer," Hanafi acknowledged, "but the U.S. has women dying, especially Black women dying, at three times the rate of white women.”
Hanafi is advocating for conversations around how to expedite innovations that could be life-changing to women, with safety remaining the top priority. “FDA can kind of be in their little silo, but I think there's an opportunity here to bring FDA together with innovators, to break down some miscommunication,” she said.
Besides educating lawmakers, WHA has also helped patients find their voice and connect with others over shared life experiences. Lauren Ruotolo, a patient with the rare disease McCune-Albright Syndrome, told Fierce Healthcare the movement “gives us a new moment to activate ourselves. … I think that’s why so many people come, too. They feel like they’re part of a sisterhood.”
“It’s also become a really great patient community and network, where I have referred other patients to these advocates that can help them out,” Ruotolo added.