When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, it was clear that the U.S. approach to women’s rights and gender equality around the world would shift. Republican administrations have long diverged from Democratic ones on this front, favoring women’s economic empowerment and private-sector development over broader campaigns to challenge traditional gender norms or expand reproductive rights.
Yet rather than again steering U.S. global engagement on women’s rights in a more conservative direction, the second Trump administration has dismantled the bipartisan policy architecture that sustained those efforts. In doing so, the White House has overturned more than six decades of policy precedent, including from Trump’s first term.
When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, it was clear that the U.S. approach to women’s rights and gender equality around the world would shift. Republican administrations have long diverged from Democratic ones on this front, favoring women’s economic empowerment and private-sector development over broader campaigns to challenge traditional gender norms or expand reproductive rights.
Yet rather than again steering U.S. global engagement on women’s rights in a more conservative direction, the second Trump administration has dismantled the bipartisan policy architecture that sustained those efforts. In doing so, the White House has overturned more than six decades of policy precedent, including from Trump’s first term.
The U.S. government has invested in women’s global socioeconomic empowerment for decades. In 1973, under President Richard Nixon, Congress first passed legislation mandating that foreign assistance pay “particular attention” to activities that integrate women into national economies. That clause, championed by Republican Sen. Charles H. Percy, prompted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to establish its first Women in Development Office in 1974.
Republican and Democratic administrations have interpreted this mandate differently. Reproductive rights became a divisive issue early on: President Ronald Reagan introduced the Mexico City policy in 1984, restricting U.S. foreign assistance to organizations that provide or advocate for abortion services. The policy has been instated by every Republican president and rescinded by every Democrat ever since.
Still, leaders of both parties have historically recognized that it is in the economic and geopolitical interest of the United States to reduce poverty, fight infectious diseases, and prevent humanitarian emergencies around the world—and that doing so requires investing in women, who comprise about half of the global population.
During Reagan’s first term, for instance, USAID released its “Women in Development” policy, warning that educational, health, legal, and institutional hurdles were holding back women’s economic potential worldwide. Building on this legacy, in 2019 Congress passed the bipartisan Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act. The first Trump administration launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative to support women’s economic participation worldwide.
Upon taking office this year, Trump rapidly dismantled USAID and most of its programs. What remains of U.S. foreign aid focuses mostly on crisis relief and is now managed by the State Department. The administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 eliminates all bilateral funding for family planning and reproductive health as well as for maternal and child health, except for polio; its new global health strategy makes no reference to women.
The Trump administration has also rolled back U.S. support for women’s political leadership, a once-bipartisan pillar of U.S. democracy assistance. Launched under Reagan in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its affiliate institutes have worked alongside the State Department and USAID to support democratic institutions abroad. Over time, these efforts have expanded to include women’s political participation—not as a left-wing project, but as a bipartisan commitment to more inclusive and resilient governance.
For instance, the International Republican Institute—a NED partner with senior GOP leaders among its founders and board of directors—has led the Women’s Democracy Network since 2006, offering training and support to women leaders worldwide. Although NED has so far managed to protect its congressional funding, the Trump administration is seeking to defund the organization and has slashed all other sources of international democracy support.
Besides hollowing out foreign assistance, the Trump administration has dismantled the U.S. government’s infrastructure for integrating attention to gender equality and women into foreign policy. Trump’s July reorganization of the State Department eliminated the Office of Global Women’s Issues (GWI), as well as teams in other bureaus that once held portfolios related to women’s rights, such as the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
The now-defunct GWI office built on a long-standing institutional commitment to women’s rights, both as a moral imperative and diplomatic tactic. Recognizing that women played a key role in winning hearts and minds during the Cold War, the State Department appointed a consultant on women’s activities as early as 1961. The Nixon and Ford administrations created an office of International Women’s Programs within the Bureau of International Organization Affairs in the 1970s, seeing women’s rights as a strategic way to enhance U.S. power on the multilateral stage.
In the 1990s, Congress upped the ante. Following intense lobbying by feminist groups, the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act mandated that the State Department designate a senior advisor on international women’s human rights. President Bill Clinton responded by setting up the Office of International Women’s Issues, which President George W. Bush continued to support. This office became the GWI when President Barack Obama elevated it to report directly to the secretary of state and created the position of ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues.
Until the White House shut it down in the spring, the GWI had provided in-house guidance for the State Department across three presidential administrations, including during Trump’s first term. When asked about the consequences of closing the GWI office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress in May that women’s issues would be integrated into U.S. foreign policy through U.S. embassies and regional bureaus. But there are no more dedicated resources, staff, or guidance in place for the State Department to carry this out.
When the State Department released its annual human rights reports in August, it did not include the standard sections on women’s rights that had been present since 1979, when the department under President Jimmy Carter told embassies that women’s rights “needs to be covered with greater specificity in all reports.” In 1994, the State Department expanded the scope of what constituted women’s rights to include violations such as domestic violence, employment discrimination, and human trafficking. Systematic data collection continued until this year.
Perhaps the most surprising rollback was the April announcement via Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s X post that the Pentagon had “proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program.” In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spearheaded WPS as an interagency plan to ensure the greater inclusion of women in peace and security across the U.S. government. The move was based on a growing body of research showing that women experience conflict differently from men and that women’s participation improves peace processes and long-term stability.
Hegseth called WPS a “Biden initiative,” arguing that “troops HATE it.” Both claims are demonstrably false. When the first Trump administration enshrined the WPS agenda into law with the 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act, the Republican-controlled Congress touted it as a win. The act passed thanks in part to two legislators who are now cabinet members: Rubio was a Senate co-sponsor, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem introduced the act in the House.
In 2019, Trump released a new WPS strategy that the White House said reaffirmed the United States’ “strong and unwavering commitment to advancing women’s equality.” Coupled with appropriations in the National Defense Authorization Act, the strategy (and that which followed it under President Joe Biden) pushed the Department of Defense to create gender advisor positions, develop training on the gender dimensions of conflict and crisis, bolster bilateral security cooperation through joint exercises and regional training academies on WPS, and introduce programs for civilian protection in conflict.
Many champions of WPS came from the uniformed military, who recognized its operational effectiveness. A leaked memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April urged Trump to retain the Department of Defense’s WPS programming, calling it “a low-cost, high-yield uncontested advantage over our competitors” that contributed to preventing radicalization, disrupting trafficking networks, and countering China and Russia.
The Trump administration has abandoned the consensus that women’s participation and perspectives add value to U.S. security policy and operations. Last month, Hegseth again took aim at women’s inclusion in the U.S. military, cutting the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, which he accused of “advancing a divisive feminist agenda.” The committee was established in 1951 under President Harry Truman. It focused on addressing challenges facing female service members, such as ill-fitting body armor.
The Trump administration is trying to rebrand any attention to women and gender equality in U.S. foreign policy as radical left-wing overreach. But it is the White House’s rejection of a bipartisan consensus going back more than 70 years that is the real break with the past.