In the early 1990s, more than 160,000 women enrolled in a study. They gave blood. They answered questionnaires. They came back, year after year, decade after decade, and let researchers follow their bodies through menopause, through heart disease, through cancer diagnoses, through the slow careful work of understanding what happens to women as they age. The Women’s Health Initiative was the largest study of its kind ever conducted in the United States. It was also, until recently, still running.
Earlier this year, DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration’s cost-cutting initiative led by Elon Musk) targeted the NIH-funded Women’s Health Initiative for budget cuts, slashing the research infrastructure sustaining the study for over thirty years. News of the cuts sent shockwaves through medical and scientific communities, with researchers warning immediately that what was being dismantled was not a line item. It was irreplaceable data. Interrupted longitudinal studies cannot be restarted. The women who enrolled in 1993 cannot be re-enrolled. The timeline is gone.
The WHI has shaped clinical practice for three decades. It is the study that revised the guidance on hormone replacement therapy. It produced foundational findings on cardiovascular disease in women, on the relationship between diet and cancer risk, on bone density in aging. Researchers across disciplines have used its dataset to ask questions the original designers never anticipated, because that is what longitudinal data does. It keeps answering new questions long after the original ones are resolved.
Except when someone pulls the funding before the study is finished.
The WHI cuts are part of a larger pattern. A Center for American Progress analysis found that DOGE eliminated at least $3 billion in grants specifically targeting women’s health, safety, and workforce programs, including research on Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disorders, reproductive health, and mental health conditions that disproportionately affect women. Multiyear studies tracking hundreds of participants, years into their research arcs, were stopped in the middle.
This is not a story about efficiency. Cutting a study that has already run for thirty years, before it reaches its natural conclusion, does not save meaningful money. The infrastructure cost has been paid. The participants are enrolled. The only thing being eliminated is the answers.
Women were not included in major clinical trials in the United States until the 1990s. The NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 mandated their inclusion in federally funded research. The WHI was born directly from that mandate. It was not a gift. It was a correction, arriving after decades in which medical knowledge was built on male bodies and applied to female ones, without anyone stopping to verify that the translation was accurate. Dosages, diagnostic criteria, symptom presentations, treatment protocols, all of it built on data that largely did not include women.
Thirty years later, the correction is being defunded.
The consequences will not be evenly distributed. The WHI was deliberately designed to include women of color to address the research gaps that had accumulated from decades of predominantly white clinical trials. Communities that have historically received the least from medical research stand to lose the most when the studies built to include them are cut. Research on conditions that disproportionately affect Black women, including lupus, fibroids, and pregnancy complications, was among what was targeted.
RFK Jr. initially called reporting on the cuts fake news. An HHS official later said the agency would work to restore funding. The investigators were told the termination decision had been reconsidered. But formal confirmation has not arrived in writing, and the researchers are operating in sustained uncertainty about whether the work they have spent decades building will be allowed to finish on its own terms.
There will not be another WHI. What is lost when a longitudinal study is interrupted is not a number. It is the questions that will now go unanswered, in the bodies of women who will live and age and get sick without the science that was supposed to reach them. The women who enrolled thirty years ago did so because they believed their participation mattered. They were right. The question now is whether the people in power believe the same.
