The Trump administration’s antifraud task force announced this week that it has removed over three quarters of a million fraudulent and ineligible enrollees from the Obamacare health insurance marketplace. Officials say an additional 440,000 suspicious enrollees will be investigated in the coming months.

On Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance, who chairs the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, announced that at least 750,000 fraudulent Obamacare enrollees are being removed from the marketplace, which will save an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds. “The average American child received about $4,000 in health care benefits every single year,” he noted. “That means that we are saving 550,000 American children’s worth of health care that was going to fraudsters and now will go to the essential services for which it was meant to go.”

As observed by The Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fraudulent enrollees “had no Social Security or immigration numbers when an agent signed them up. They also lacked a record of contact with insurers, paid no premiums, and had no medical claims.” The task force found that a significant amount of the enrollees were registered without their consent, in part because the Biden administration “enhanced subsidies that made plans free,” leading to the volume of registrants doubling over the course of Biden’s term.

This was in large part due to an army of brokers taking advantage of the system by mass-enrolling individuals into Obamacare, earning commissions of “about $25 per month of coverage per individual they enroll” whether or not the individuals were eligible or not. As Vance highlighted, “In one case, we found a fraud ring that had 40 brokerage agents who had funneled 50,000 people into the Obamacare system fraudulently.” Last year alone, over 300,000 consumers filed complaints with CMS stating that brokers had “enrolled them in or switched them to new plans without their authorization.”

In addition, vast amounts of fraud were allowed to happen largely due to grossly incompetent government oversight. The Government Accountability Office found that “23 of 24 applications it had created for fictional people were approved by the federal exchange.” Auditors further found that “more than 29,000 Social Security numbers in 2023 and nearly 68,000 in 2024 were used to obtain more than one year’s worth of coverage in a single year” — showing that the exchange is rife with identity fraud.

The news comes as reports surfaced Thursday that the White House task force uncovered an additional $1.2 billion in COVID-era contract fraud. According to the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Health and Human Services, “emergency” COVID contracts, including vaccine contracts, were awarded well after the pandemic was officially declared over under the Biden administration.

“The COVID emergency ended over three years ago, yet fraudsters continue to weaponize outdated emergency contracts to abuse taxpayer dollars,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst lamented. “GSA will continue to work with the Vice President’s task force to stop improper payments, refer suspected fraud to law enforcement, and fight to recover every dollar.”

The GSA estimates that the vast majority (93%) of the outdated contracts have yet to be distributed to vendors. Still, Task Force Executive Director Scott Brady stated that GSA “stopped $41 million … across five HHS COVID-era contracts that kept the emergency label alive long after the emergency was gone.”

All told, the Trump administration has declared it has uncovered $260.7 billion in fraud since January 2025, stopped $72 billion in fraud per year, and carried out enforcement actions on $58.9 billion in fraudulently purloined taxpayer funds.

Lawmakers like Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) say that the task force’s work is vital to protecting taxpayer dollars and protecting America’s most vulnerable citizens. “This task force has the potential to save billions in taxpayer dollars,” he emphasized during remarks on the Senate floor Thursday. “This action will ensure resources are only going to those who are eligible and have signed up or authorized their enrollment. Too often, taxpayers’ money is lost to fraud, waste and abuse. This not only wastes taxpayer dollars, but it also limits how effectively those dollars could be used to help the most vulnerable, those people that Medicaid and Obamacare were intended to serve.”

Grassley further underscored that legislation he has introduced and supported will be critical in combatting fraud going forward. “Through the Working Families Tax Cuts Act and by improving the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program, we can crack down on bad actors stealing the taxpayers’ money and really protect resources for the most vulnerable Americans.”