What happened
The Trump administration yesterday said it had kicked 760,000 enrollees off the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace. Vice President JD Vance told a press conference that the canceled enrollees were a mix of “phantom people” and “real people who just don’t meet the eligibility requirements,” didn’t submit the proper documents or weren’t even aware they were enrolled in an ACA health plan. 

Who said what
Yesterday’s announcement by the Vance-led anti-fraud task force “represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges” since the administration’s “crackdown on fraud began last year,” The Wall Street Journal said. There’s “widespread agreement that unauthorized enrollments should be canceled,” ACA expert Cynthia Cox at KFF said to The New York Times, but it’s not clear that “these were all indeed unauthorized enrollments,” and they didn’t appear to use the “appropriate process” to determine which to cancel. 

What next?
Vance said his anti-fraud effort, including further scrutiny of up to 450,000 more enrollees and bans on about 600 ACA brokers, would save $2.2 billion. The “price of ACA insurance has skyrocketed” during Trump’s second term, “prompting millions to downgrade their plans or exit the program entirely,” The Associated Press said. “Early filings from insurers suggest that prices will increase substantially again next year,” the Times said.

What happened
Senior FBI officials last year shut down a nascent “sweeping bribery probe” that included pay-to-play allegations involving Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ProPublica reported yesterday, citing a “trove of evidence gathered by the FBI,” legal records and dozens of interviews. The FBI investigation stemmed from three 2024 “tell-all interviews” with Martin Kao, the former head of a Hawaiian defense contractor that secretly donated tens of thousands of dollars to Collins’ campaign after she reportedly steered millions in federal contracts to the company for research “of no real value.” Kao pleaded guilty in 2022 to illegal campaign contributions and pandemic-aid fraud charges and was sentenced to 87 months in prison in February 2025.

Who said what
ProPublica’s “truly outrageous” report is “clearly a political hit job,” Collins told reporters yesterday. The “seven-year-old allegations” were “thoroughly investigated” and dismissed by the “Biden Justice Department” in 2021. Kao’s detailed 2024 “confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation,” ProPublica said. But agents didn’t “uncover much evidence to corroborate” his claims about Collins and her advisers, The New York Times said, citing “current and former officials” who also “acknowledged that it was possible more could have surfaced if the investigation had developed further.” 

What next?
President Donald Trump’s “purge of anyone who had ever investigated him” eviscerated the federal units “handling public corruption investigations,” ProPublica said, and the probe “sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead.”

Mosquito excrement has “recently emerged as a promising alternative substrate for pathogen detection,” said a study published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum. It can “provide a critical warning before human cases begin, allowing health officials to act quickly.” 

To collect mosquito excretions, scientists built a “mosquito toilet,” a “3D-printed funnel” that allows “liquid to bead up and slide into a collection tube,” Rutgers University said in a news release on the study. Researchers then sequenced the genetic material and “recovered a complete West Nile virus genome, found the first known evidence of a Hedwig-like virus in the Americas and detected several viruses that may be new to science.” The mosquito waste also contained trypanosomatids, or “single-celled parasites associated with insects and other hosts,” said Earth.com.

Traditional mosquito surveillance “requires collecting large numbers of insects, sorting them by species and testing for specific pathogens,” said Lab Compare. This slow process can “delay information during an outbreak and only detects what researchers already know to look for.” 

The new study involved only 100 mosquitoes collected from one location in New Jersey, so the “results cannot show how common these viruses are across New Jersey or elsewhere in North America,” said Earth.com. The mosquitoes were also “moved into the collection device in a laboratory” rather than tested at the collection point.

Researchers are now “working toward a field-ready trap that would collect mosquitoes and their waste,” Rutgers said. Eventually, there may be a “system that could prepare samples, sequence genetic material, analyze the results remotely and alert scientists to a possible threat in real time.”