In a win for women’s health, proposed cuts to the Women’s Health Initiative – ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency – seem to have been rescinded.
Following significant outcry from the science and medical communities, federal officials said they would restore funding to the WHI, one of the largest and oldest studies focused on women’s health and aging. “These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” said Emily G. Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, according to The New York Times.
Just a week earlier, on April 21, the HHS had informed WHI investigators that it would cancel regional center contracts in September as part of a broader DOGE-ordered 35% cut to the National Institutes of Health. In a flip-flop, “we are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts,” Hilliard said.
But Marcia Stefanick, a professor at Stanford University and a WHI investigator, told Axios that researchers themselves had not received any direct correspondence to this effect. No emails, no calls. She and others are keeping fingers crossed – especially because their work centers around reducing cancer rates and better understanding serious health conditions in postmenopausal women.
Some of WHI’s work even spans generations, with adult children of study subjects now taking part in the research process. “We have offspring of our participants that say their mothers told them that this was the most important thing they ever did in their lives,” Stefanick added.
Which makes the prospective loss of both the past work and forward momentum all the more painful for researchers to consider. “It’s devastating for those of us who mentor young people and for those of us who have been doing this research.”
She said: “This is my research. I’ve been doing it for 32 years. How could it just disappear in five months?” But there is hope now, if tentative, of its survival.
