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One thing that’s important to remember, and that I feel a lot of people don’t remember, is that governments don’t fund anything - they direct funds towards other people. Taxpayers fund things.
You don’t want the government to spend money on social welfare - you want your fellow Americans to do so. Unfortunately, a large portion of your fellow taxpayers feel like they are footing the bill for the destruction of their lifestyles. They feel that the spending is both excessive and directly against their interests.
Social welfare has always been something the right wishes to reduce - mostly because social welfare is too indiscriminate towards those it helps. Many taxpayers don’t want to spend money helping an unrepentant fuckup, but would be fine donating it to someone who is down on their luck. The government being in charge of distribution removes this discretion, and (considering both this story and the story of FEMA workers refusing to assist Trump voters) actively works against their intuition of who needs help.
On the contrary, it's too discriminate. Lots of people are in genuine need for help, but the government allocates funds on the basis of proximity to officials and how useful the recipients are to politicians, forming a toxic positive feedback loop. This money would have done more social good if someone drove through the streets throwing bags of it off the back of a truck.
The sad truth is that scammers often are much better at navigating the hoops, and way more willing to play the game for social workers etc. (e.g. one example from the job of "I am a poor single mother in fear of domestic violence from my partner" who prevailed with this on the social worker to get the guy kicked out, when it was he doing the childcare and she was drinking, betting on the horses, and negligent of the kids*. Mommy's rationale? if she could present herself to the housing department, and public sympathy, with this story then she would get preferential treatment for 'I want that new build house and if you don't give it to me I'll go public with my sob story') than honest people who are genuinely in need.
As a government low-level minion, you may suspect the hell out of "this is a scam" but unless you have rock-solid undeniable evidence and proof that will stand up in court before a bleeding-heart judge who believes it is the responsibility of the local/national government to hand out money and goodies to the needy, you can't do a thing about refusing to process the application, because any whiff of anything that can be deemed to be used in a court case for discrimination by an ambulance-chaser lawyer will get you, the department, and everyone in trouble.
So the incentive is there, even if you're not a bleeding-heart yourself, to just tick the boxes and go along with the CYA process.
**Even funnier, her dad owned the local bookmakers, so she knew what she was talking about when she said 'this woman and her maternal family spend all day drinking in the pub and betting on the horses'. But of course, all this is only hearsay so it can't go down on the official files. And of course, nobody from the office can go on the radio with "this story is a heap of bullshit and she's a lying bitch", so these sob-stories get into the media and are believed uncritically by the public who don't know any better, who get served this by a journalist all too eager for a good human interest story that will grab headlines and attention. If you ever hear/read "We contacted Department/Office Z about this and they refused to comment", this does not mean "yeah the story is all true and they have no defence", it means "legally they can't say a word because bound by confidentiality".
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I'll agree to that.
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I disagree, for the same reason the government does.
The intended recipients of the social program budget are the social workers; the point of these programs is to employ them. It's UBI, basically- that's the social good the government is buying, and abating starvation in the poorest cross-section of the proletariat is secondary. After all, it's not them who'll be revolting if their meal ticket were revoked (if they were capable of this they wouldn't need the aid, obviously); and "but if you axe these programs then children will die" [cue Sarah McLachlan] has for the overwhelming fraction of modernity been a nearly unbeatable campaign slogan so it continues.
That's why fraud really is small potatoes here- the stated goal of "making sure the disadvantaged get the money" is a propaganda line to make the UBI-receivers think they're doing good (and to keep the low-information voters in line), much like "making sure children get educated" is for the education system.
For maximum cynicism, you can class all UBI-receivers as the intended recipients- "fraud" is just a way of asserting that you're smart enough, and assertive enough, to be a threat to the government's social project (whatever that happens to be and why remains an exercise for the reader), and should have bags of money thrown at you to mollify you just like the natives do. If you are not, it's a signal you'll act in other anti-social ways that are more obviously identifiable as such (especially in male-coded ways that associate would-be-only-fraudsters with imminent security threats [i.e. eating the neighborhood pets], which make the other UBI-receivers nervous thus risking they do things that result in more votes for the other guy).
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