The first year of a new presidential administration is always busy, but so far 2025 seems to have past years beat, as President Donald Trump has signed a record number of executive orders in just his first 100 days.

Now that we’re a little over halfway through the year, we wanted to look back on what has happened in the healthcare industry so far.

Hiring and firing. With a new administration comes the appointment of new department heads. That has included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being named secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Mehmet Oz tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Marty Makary to run the FDA, and Susan Monarez to head up the CDC.

However, these departments also saw major staffing overhauls. The NIH saw top officials step down in mid-February, with hundreds of layoffs following. HHS announced in late March it would lay off 10,000 employees—on top of 10,000 who had resigned already—which has impacted specific research areas like reproductive health and environmental health.

See our policy highlights here.—NO

For decades, women’s health was underfunded and poorly understood.

Women weren’t required to be included in NIH research until 1993, according to its Office of Research on Women’s Health. And the American Heart Association did not establish that women’s symptoms of heart disease differed from men’s until 1999.

“Our current healthcare system is largely built for and by men,” Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a telehealth service for women and families, told Healthcare Brew.

Symptoms of conditions like perimenopause and menopause were dismissed as a “normal part of aging,” Joanna Strober, founder and CEO of Midi Health, a virtual care clinic for women in midlife, told Healthcare Brew.

But over the last 25 years, the landscape has shifted. In 2006, for instance, the FDA approved the first vaccine against HPV, which can cause cervical cancer.

More here on how approaches to women’s health have changed.—CC