WASHINGTON — Rep. Grace Meng is known affectionately around Capitol Hill as “the period lady."

And she’s just “fine with that" – at least it means people are talking about what has become the New York Democrat's signature issue and one she has found surprising success pushing during Donald Trump's presidency.

Meng wants women in the U.S. and abroad to have free or affordable access to pads, tampons and other menstrual products. She's already helped secure them in all federal prisons and was key to getting FEMA to allow homeless shelters to buy them using grant money.

Yet, Meng, 43, is not finished. She's now rallying support for two bills that would further expand access to the products. The Menstrual Equity for All Act would make pads and tampons free for girls, the homeless, low-income women and prisoners. It would also make them available at businesses and federal buildings and, if passed, would be purchasable using health savings accounts. Her other bill, the Menstrual Products Right to Know Act, would require companies to disclose chemicals used in their production.

While there are a few partisan sticking points on the issue – such as how to pay for some of the programs – Meng said she hasn’t received much pushback over the idea itself. Instead, much of her challenge lies in getting people comfortable talking about periods in the first place.

Sometimes when she tries to pitch Democratic colleagues on her bill, they get squeamish. It's not uncommon for them to sign on as co-sponsors to get her to stop talking.

“Some of them have said that to my face: ‘I'll sign on, and you don't need to explain anymore,’” Meng told USA TODAY during an interview in her office in May. “I think that's hilarious … however I can get them to be a co-sponsor if that’s part of our strategy, I’m fine with that.”

Meng’s pitch hinges on raising awareness through stories, including about women in the United States struggling with access to tampons and pads, such as when girls skip school because they can’t afford them.

“A lot of times we are very sympathetic to helping people and the plight that they are enduring from underdeveloped countries, but not realizing that these are oftentimes the same issues that people right here in America, right here in their own district,” said Meng, a lawyer who represents Queens, N.Y.

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Championed access for the homeless, prisoners

When she was sworn in to Congress in 2013, it was not her mission to get women and girls pads and tampons. She didn’t even know it was a problem until her office got a letter from a junior high school student who wrote that homeless shelters couldn’t use grant money to buy the products.

Meng wrote a letter to the Obama Administration asking if they’d change the rules. A few months later she heard back: FEMA policy would now allow homeless shelters to use grant money to buy the products.

Building on her momentum, she wrote to the Department of Justice under Obama. She asked if they would change agency policy to make the products available to inmates at federal prisons. When Trump won the 2016 election, Meng was convinced her request would die in the GOP administration. It didn’t. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote back saying the products would be made available at federal prisons. That policy was codified into law in the bipartisan First Step Act, which was signed into law in December.

Helena Bragg was incarcerated off and on for over 25 years. She said inmates made at most 45 cents an hour and a box of tampons could cost more than 16 times that. She said the high cost forced women to take unsanitary actions like separating sanitary napkins into tampons.

Bragg has worked with an elected official in Virginia on a law that would provide menstrual products at state jails and prisons, which are not covered under federal policy.

Meng has been “shocked and surprised” at the success she’s had with the Trump administration, but she said there’s still work to be done to turn those policies into laws that can’t be undone by future administrations. For the First Step Act, she’d like to see a law that outlines how to implement the program.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., a cosponsor of Meng’s menstrual equity bill, says she has a gift for identifying "niche spaces that actually affect a lot of people, but that you wouldn’t have immediately considered. And then she gets you to consider it and she populates the idea."

Meng's ideas and her enthusiasm are shared by others — including men.

Virginia state Del. Mark Keam was one of the first male lawmakers to introduce legislation that promotes access to menstrual products and he has no problem embracing the topic, saying he's “trying to put the ‘men’ in ‘menstrual equality.’”

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., another co-sponsor of Meng's equity bill, acknowledged the issue can be seen as taboo, which he said presents a problem.

“You just wouldn’t treat a subject for men the same way," he said. "The fact that there is some kind of embarrassment or reluctance to say openly what’s going on is, I think a measure of how screwed up the topic still is.”

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf has been an advocate for “menstrual equity” since she learned that teens in her community were collecting the products. She has worked closely with Meng on the issue. She has long questioned how it is possible that something that affects half the population is “nearly completely absent" from the bill-making process.

“This really does impact people’s ability to be participatory in our society and it seems to me that’s a real detrimental gap in our lawmaking. We’re talking about a normal bodily function for half the population being utterly ignored,” she said.

While Meng is shepherding her bills in Congress, her colleagues are helping push the issue. This year Rep. Zoe Lofrgen, D-Calif., in her post as chair of the Committee on House Administration, made it official policy that House members could use their budget to purchase menstrual products for their offices. It was discovered to be an issue after Maloney tried to buy them in 2018 and was denied reimbursement.

“It’s not an issue of war and peace. But if you’re menstruating, you have your period, and you can’t find a tampon or a pad that’s an emergency, right?” said the California Democrat, a co-sponsor of Meng’s Menstrual Equity for All bill.

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'Devil is always in the details'

Congresswomen on both sides of the aisle who spoke to USA TODAY broadly agree on the importance of access to the products.

In the last Congress, Meng worked with then Kansas GOP Rep. Lynn Jenkins to add a provision to a larger bill that would allow people to use health savings accounts to buy menstrual products. It passed the House, but was never brought up in the Senate.

Former California GOP Rep. Mimi Walters voted in favor of the bill and said she “would be very supportive of females being able to gain access to these hygiene products that are a necessity for women.”

However, Walters cautioned, “the devil is always in the details of cost, and we would have to be mindful of what the cost would be to the taxpayer.” Meng's bill does not yet have a cost estimate.

It also does not currently have any Republican co-sponsors. She acknowledged that paying for the programs could be a point of contention and she knows some sections of her bill may be better received by Republicans than others, which is why she is open to breaking it up to pass the bill in pieces.

Congress “is very unpredictable," Meng said. "You never know where you might find allies. And so we will, you know, do whatever we can to make sure that we're working to pass all these pieces, whether it's one piece or separate pieces."

The crusade for access to menstrual products extends beyond Congress, where the actions of Meng and others seem to have reverberated to the high school level.

Natalie Baumeister, a high school senior, who has had some success expanding access within her own school, appeared at a press conference with Meng as she introduced her bill in March. Last year, Baumeister, the president of her Virginia high school’s chapter of Girl Up, a club focused on gender equality, worked with the administration to stock menstrual products in all the restrooms so students no longer had to go to the nurse’s office and ask.

“It’s just nice to know that it’s not all a government full of corruption. There are still people who know that ‘this is something that my constituents need, this is something that is going to help the people and I’m going to fight for it,’” Baumeister said.

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