For years, Americans have been told that Washington simply needs more money, more programs and more bureaucracy to make government work.
The Trump administration is offering a different answer: maybe Washington should start checking whether the people receiving the money are actually eligible for it.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it has canceled approximately 315,000 Obamacare enrollments covering more than 760,000 people after determining that the enrollments were unauthorized. The cancellations are expected to return roughly $2.2 billion in federal subsidies to taxpayers.
That is not pocket change.
CMS said the action followed investigations conducted in coordination with insurers and was part of a broader crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse within the federal health insurance exchanges.
And the administration isn't stopping with the enrollments.
CMS also announced that it had sent 569 notices of intent to terminate Exchange agreements with agents and brokers who submitted 2026 applications without required identifying information, including Social Security numbers. So far, 66 agents and brokers have been terminated, with additional cases still under review.
Apparently, basic identification was too much to ask from some people profiting from the system.
The administration has also imposed a six-month moratorium on new registrations for agents and brokers in federally facilitated exchanges. The temporary measure is intended to give CMS time to implement additional program-integrity safeguards before allowing new brokers into the system. States operating their own exchanges are not covered by the moratorium.
Naturally, the broker industry has pushed back, arguing that legitimate brokers could be caught in the crackdown alongside bad actors.
That concern deserves consideration. But CMS says the data show a reason for taking a harder look at newly registered agents.
According to the agency, agents new to the 2026 plan year had substantially higher rates of questionable enrollment activity. Their applications showed a 2.8-times higher rate of unresolved income-verification problems, a 2.7-times higher rate of missing Social Security numbers, a 2.6-times higher rate of unresolved citizenship or immigration-status verification issues, and a 1.4-times higher rate of dual enrollment in Exchange coverage and Medicaid.
Those numbers don't prove that every new broker was engaged in fraud.
They do, however, explain why federal officials decided that simply looking the other way was no longer acceptable.
And there is an even bigger problem lurking behind the latest crackdown.
Why did it take this long?
A Government Accountability Office audit released last year found that CMS had suspended 850 agents and brokers in October 2024 because of reasonable suspicion involving unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized plan switches.
Then, in May 2025, CMS officials told GAO that the agency had reinstated all 850 in order to better fulfill statutory and regulatory procedures.
That decision deserves answers.
It is not clear whether any of those reinstated brokers are among the agents who have now received termination notices. The administration's current crackdown makes that question even more important.
The scale of the underlying problem is difficult to ignore.
CMS said it received approximately 300,000 complaints in 2025 involving unauthorized enrollments or unauthorized switches between health plans. A separate GAO report put the figure at 299,604 complaints, up from 258,424 in 2024.
That's not a rounding error.
That's a systemic warning sign.
The good news is that CMS says those trends have reversed in 2026. The Trump administration's latest actions are designed to make sure they stay that way.
But cleaning up the mess also means answering for the decisions that allowed it to grow.
If federal officials previously identified hundreds of brokers for suspicious conduct and then reinstated all of them, Americans deserve to know exactly why. If some of those same actors are now being targeted again, Congress should demand a clear explanation of what changed and when.
There is nothing radical about requiring people who receive billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies to prove who they are and whether they qualify.
There is nothing partisan about stopping unauthorized insurance enrollments.
And there is certainly nothing unreasonable about asking Washington's sprawling healthcare bureaucracy one simple question:
How much money could have been saved if someone had checked sooner?
The Trump administration's $2.2 billion recovery is a significant step toward restoring accountability to a system that has too often rewarded paperwork, loopholes and middlemen while ordinary Americans foot the bill.
For taxpayers who work, pay their premiums and watch Washington spend their money, that is the kind of government accountability they should have been getting all along.
