President Donald Trump isnt waiting for Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act .

Hes trying to undermine it right now.

As Politicos Paul Demko first reported on Thursday evening, the Department of Health and Human Services has cancelled a final burst of television and radio advertising designed to encourage people to sign up for Obamacare insurance plans.

The Obama administration had arranged for the ads, and paid for them, before leaving office. A senior HHS communications adviser, who declined to give his name, said the Trump administration decided to stop the advertising for the sake of efficiency, and to save on the $5 million that the campaign would have cost.

We arent going to continue spending millions of taxpayers dollars promoting a failed government program, the HHS official said. Once an assessment was made, we pulled back the most expensive and least efficient part of this massive ad campaign, which was set to run over the weekend. Those costs savings will be returned to the U.S. Treasury.

Demkos story reported that HHS was also halting other efforts, as well, including direct emails and automatic phone calls to individuals who had previously registered at Healthcare.gov (the governments website for buying insurance) and had yet to get coverage.

But some outreach emails went out on Friday anyway, and it wasnt clear whether the Trump administration had always intended to continue the email effort, whether administration officials had changed their minds, or whether the Friday emails were the result of some kind of administrative error.

(The unnamed HHS official told The Huffington Post that email and automatic phone calls were among the outreach tools that remained available to the agency, but he would not clarify exactly what that meant.)

Whatever the precise details of the policy change, the timing is critical. The open enrollment period for 2017 ends next week, on Jan. 31, and traditionally, signups have surged in the final days before the deadline.

Those late signups dont merely boost the programs enrollment numbers. They also help insurers to hold down premiums.

Thats because insurance depends on premiums from healthy people to underwrite the medical bills of the small minority with serious health problems. And people in relatively good health are precisely the types to postpone enrolling until the very last minute.