Vance task force to cancel 760,000 ACA enrollments, projecting $2.2B savings

CMS to cut off 469 brokers, impose nationwide moratorium on new agents

A task force led by Vice President JD Vance is preparing to remove hundreds of thousands of enrollments from the Affordable Care Act’s public exchanges, with administration officials saying those enrollees do not meet eligibility requirements or do not exist at all.

The enforcement action, announced Tuesday by the Vance-led White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges since the Trump administration’s enforcement push began last year.

Vice President Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are set to jointly announce the cancellation of subsidy payments for the 760,000 allegedly unauthorized or fraudulent ACA accounts, according to administration officials. Officials said the cancellations would amount to an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer savings.

Officials said the affected enrollments include people who are unaware they are enrolled, people who are ineligible because they have employer-provided health coverage, and people whose annual income exceeds 400 percent of the federal poverty level. The Department of Health and Human Services sets the federal poverty level at $15,650 for one person or $32,150 for a family of four.

CMS will also announce that it is cutting off hundreds of brokers and agents who signed people up for government healthcare, and is issuing a nationwide moratorium on all new agents and brokers. Brokers and agents are paid by insurance companies and can receive up to $25 a month for each new enrollee.

Administration officials said some brokers have exploited that compensation structure by signing individuals up for healthcare without checking identification. Federal law allows CMS to block agents from the exchange, or blacklist them. According to officials, 40 agents and brokers generated 50,000 allegedly fake enrollments, costing the government $45 million. CMS has already cut off 66 agents from the system and plans to terminate 469 more, according to administration officials.

The action follows a Department of Health and Human Services report from earlier in 2026 that estimated nearly half of new Obamacare sign-ups from 2021 to 2024 were likely improper, phantom, or fraudulent. CMS estimates that more than a million enrollees signed up for the benefit without providing a Social Security number.

Federal regulators are ending a Biden-era policy that officials said permitted enrollees to continue receiving monthly subsidies even after declining to supply mandatory identity and eligibility documentation. CMS is planning to check the immigration status and income eligibility of 415,000 current enrollees.

During the Biden administration, Obamacare enrollment grew from approximately 10 million to more than 22 million. As a candidate, Joe Biden campaigned on expanding the healthcare law passed while he was vice president in 2010. His administration expanded access during the Covid-19 pandemic through two main budget bills that added incentives for sign-ups and temporarily expanded subsidies to help low-income and middle-income families.

When the pandemic ended and states began tightening Medicaid eligibility for tens of millions of people, the Biden administration created $0-premium ACA plans for those cut off from Medicaid. A Democratic provision in the Covid-era budget bill that lifted income caps expired at the end of 2025, despite calls from Democrats and some Republicans to extend the enhanced subsidies.