The Trump administration has removed roughly 750,000 people from Affordable Care Act health plans as part of a broad crackdown on suspected fraudulent, unauthorized or otherwise ineligible enrollments, Vice President JD Vance announced Tuesday. Administration officials said the cancellations are expected to save taxpayers approximately $2.2 billion.

The initiative is being carried out through the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, headed by Vance, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services playing a central role. CMS has been tightening verification and enforcement procedures across the ACA exchanges, saying unauthorized enrollments and improper subsidies have become a significant problem.

“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said during a press conference.

Oz also estimated that approximately 35 percent of people enrolled through the ObamaCare exchanges have never made use of their insurance coverage.

Vance stressed that the administration views the initiative as an anti-fraud effort rather than an attempt to strip legitimate beneficiaries of health coverage.

“This is not about cutting off anybody from their benefits. It’s about cutting off fraudsters from stealing from these programs,” the vice president said Tuesday.

Vance and Oz said they were confident that legitimate beneficiaries would not be improperly removed, pointing to factors including the absence of insurance claims, missing Social Security numbers and failures to respond to attempts by the government to verify enrollment information. Reuters reported that the canceled policies involved unverified citizenship or immigration status as well as suspected unauthorized enrollments.

“We are putting ourselves under an extraordinary burden of proof,” Vance said. “So those 750,000 people are people that we feel confident either don’t know that they’re enrolled in the program, aren’t using the program at all, are unaware of it or … are potentially phantom people who are enrolled against their will, or maybe they don’t even exist.”

The administration is also temporarily freezing the registration of new insurance agents and brokers as it expands scrutiny of the enrollment system. CMS has separately taken enforcement action against hundreds of brokers over alleged violations connected to ACA enrollment. Reuters reported that 569 brokers were barred from participation after applications were submitted at implausibly high rates or without key identifying information.

The healthcare crackdown comes weeks before the November midterm elections, as Republicans and Democrats clash over healthcare affordability and access. Republicans have defended recent changes as necessary to curb waste and improper spending, while Democrats have argued that changes to ACA subsidies and other healthcare programs could increase costs and reduce coverage.

Enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans expanded significantly during the Biden administration, helped in part by enhanced premium subsidies. The Trump administration has argued that enrollment safeguards during that period were inadequate and allowed improper or unauthorized sign-ups to proliferate. CMS said earlier this year that it had ended premium subsidies for nearly 1.5 million people over the preceding year after determining that they were either ineligible for financial assistance or had been enrolled without authorization.

Administration officials and congressional Republicans have also disputed projections about the number of Americans expected to lose insurance under Republican healthcare changes, arguing that at least some of the reductions reflect the removal of improper enrollments rather than legitimate beneficiaries losing coverage.

Republicans have accused the Biden administration and Democrats of emphasizing increased ACA enrollment without imposing adequate safeguards to ensure that applicants were eligible and had actually authorized their enrollment. Democrats and healthcare advocacy organizations have challenged that characterization and warned that stricter verification procedures can also create obstacles for eligible consumers.

Approximately 19 million Americans were enrolled in health plans through ACA exchanges as of figures released by federal health officials earlier this year. CMS publishes enrollment information for both the federally facilitated marketplace and state-based exchanges.

The Paragon Health Institute, a conservative healthcare policy organization led by Brian Blase, who served as a healthcare policy official during President Trump’s first term, has been among the groups drawing attention to alleged improper ACA enrollment. The organization estimated earlier this year that more than 6 million people were improperly enrolled in exchange coverage during 2026 and argued that improper subsidies could cost taxpayers nearly $25 billion.

Protect Our Care, a Democratic-aligned healthcare advocacy organization, disputed the administration’s characterization of the crackdown, calling the action a “smokescreen” and arguing that eligible Americans could lose health coverage. The organization also pointed to the administration’s previous reinstatement of hundreds of ACA brokers and agents who had been suspected of fraudulent activity.

“Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick. Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that. It’s a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered but to shower billionaires with tax breaks instead,” Brad Woodhouse, Protect Our Care’s president, said in a statement.