What happened: NABIP alleges a federal moratorium locks roughly 19,000 new insurance agents out of ACA open enrollment for Plan Year 2027
Who's involved: NABIP, HHS, and CMS
What's at stake: Registration access for approximately 19,000 agents and brokers, plus the enrollment assistance they provide to consumers across 29 states
Why it matters: Agencies that hired, trained, and licensed new agents for the enrollment season say they now face sunk costs and staffing shortages they cannot recover
Where it stands: Complaint filed October 15, 2026, with a motion for a temporary restraining order; no court ruling yet
Weeks before ACA open enrollment begins, the trade group representing more than 100,000 insurance agents and brokers has sued to overturn a federal ban it says punishes 19,000 professionals for problems caused by a handful of others.
The National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals filed its complaint on October 15 in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, naming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz as defendants in their official capacities.
The fight centers on a rule HHS published on September 23, 2026, without going through the usual public-comment process. That rule hands HHS the power to freeze agent and broker registrations whenever it decides that agent conduct "poses an unacceptable risk" to exchange operations. CMS used that freshly minted power the same day, declaring a freeze on "new" agent and broker registrations from September 22 through February 1, 2027.
That window covers the entire open enrollment period - November 1, 2026, through January 15, 2027 - when the vast majority of ACA plans are purchased. According to the complaint, agents or brokers assisted in more than 75% of plans bought through HealthCare.gov during the 2026 open enrollment period.
NABIP's sharpest argument may be the government's own data. According to the complaint, CMS reported 84,012 registered agents and brokers with active enrollments in Plan Year 2026. Of those, just 569 received notices of intent to terminate for noncompliance in July and August of 2026.
New agents accounted for about 30% of those 569 notices - but made up only 11% of the total registered population. And when it came to actual final terminations, new agents accounted for just 11% - exactly matching their share of the overall pool.
Less than 2% of all new agents and brokers received any termination notice at all, according to the figures cited in the filing. More than 98% did not.
Yet the moratorium blocks all roughly 19,000 agents who would have registered as new for Plan Year 2027 - while allowing every agent who was "new" in Plan Year 2026, including those who drove the very statistics CMS relies on, to register as a "returning" agent for 2027.
"CMS gives no reason to suspect that the approximately 19,000 agents and brokers that it is barring from registration are anything like the subset of the roughly 9,000 now-returning agents and brokers that are the basis for the moratorium," the complaint states.
The filing paints a timeline suggesting the ban was planned well before the rule was published. According to the complaint, CMS scheduled kickoff webinars for new and returning agents for August 11 and 12, only to cancel them without explanation. CMS later held a webinar for returning agents only on September 10 and opened their training about a week later.
The day after that webinar, the complaint alleges, it became public that CMS had - one week earlier - sent a document to the Office of Management and Budget titled "Private Health Insurance; New Agent/Broker Registrations for Plan Year 2027 Moratorium Guidance." CMS withdrew that document on September 16 without ever disclosing its contents. Six days later, the rule appeared.
NABIP argues that HHS cannot justify skipping the public-comment process by claiming urgency when CMS's own actions show the decision was made weeks earlier. Federal law generally requires agencies to let the public weigh in before adopting new rules. There is a narrow exception for genuine emergencies, but NABIP says an agency "cannot manufacture good cause through its own delay."
NABIP alleges its members - most of them small businesses or individual agents - spent months hiring, training, and licensing new staff for the 2027 enrollment season. That investment includes not just the now-blocked federal training, but insurance-company webinars, tax training, and health insurance best-practices coursework. Without federal registration, those new agents cannot enroll ACA clients. The costs of employing them continue.
The complaint also alleges that firms have spent months networking and advertising for business they now cannot handle. Potential clients turned away during open enrollment, according to the filing, are unlikely to return in future years.
NABIP filed a motion for a temporary restraining order alongside the complaint, asking the court to order CMS to open new-agent training immediately - before open enrollment begins on November 1.
The complaint raises four claims: that HHS skipped required public-comment procedures; that the new rule exceeds HHS's authority under the ACA; that CMS's decision to impose the moratorium was arbitrary and unsupported by its own evidence; and that CMS unlawfully withheld mandatory new-agent training it had repeatedly promised to provide.
For agencies that staffed up for open enrollment season, the clock is running. The broader context is a federal crackdown on fraud in the ACA marketplace - CMS has separately pointed to hundreds of thousands of cancelled policies it says were unauthorized. But NABIP says punishing 19,000 new registrants - none of whom is suspected of misconduct, according to the complaint - for the actions of a small subset is the wrong tool for the job.
The allegations have not been tested, and no court has ruled on the merits.
