Vice President JD Vance announced on September 22 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will cut 760,000 people covered by the Affordable Care Act’s tax-subsidized private health insurance plans, alleging widespread fraud.
419,000 other enrollees are under investigation for eligibility in ACA insurance plans.
Vance said that insurance brokers commit enrollment fraud due to policies from the Biden administration that created incentives to enroll patients while relaxing eligibility requirements. The Trump administration also made unsubstantiated claims that brokers enroll unqualified people, including undocumented immigrants.
Vance held a meeting with Fraud Task Force and CMS Director Dr. Mehmet Oz, who announced a six-month suspension on new ACA insurance brokers.
The Trump administration claims the move will save the US government $2.2 billion in health insurance subsidies.
This is the latest austerity measure by the Trump administration, which ramped up with his One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) in July 2025, cutting $600 billion to Medicaid and $230 billion to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
2.6 million Americans, mostly workers, lost health insurance after the OBBB discontinued tax credits, making ACA premiums rise 58% and deductibles by 37%.
Approximately 5.6 million households lost their food assistance since 2025, reaching the estimated decrease in SNAP enrollment for 2030 by the Congressional Budget Office.
Simultaneously, the OBBB increased funding for both the military and the Department of Homeland Security, with an estimated increase of over $356 billion.
The Trump administration’s “anti-fraud” Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut programs and agencies that workers and poor people relied on, and fired 277,000 federal workers by January 2026, with promises of reducing federal spending. However, during the first 11 months of 2025, federal spending increased by $248 billion compared to 2024, in line with previous spending trends according to the Cato Institute think tank.
The Trump administration farcically justifies austerity measures as fighting fraud while increasing funding for the Department of Defense (DOD), the only federal agency that has never passed a clean audit under federal legislature passed in 1990 aimed at overseeing federal spending, according to the nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste.
Despite the DOD reporting $10.8 billion in fraud between 2017-2024, $6.6 billion in fraudulent payments between 2013-2017, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reporting DOD “programs and significant expenditures will remain at substantial risk of fraud”, the Trump administration has pushed for a roughly 50% increase in the military budget, to $1.5 trillion for 2027.
Image: JD Vance speaks at “The People’s Convention” in Detroit, Michigan, 2024. Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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