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To Cut Welfare Fraud, Target Government-Funded Academic Fraud

More than half of all the research that has ever been used to design America’s social safety net is likely untrue, a study found.

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In the wake of growing revelations about massive welfare fraud, U.S. taxpayers are naturally demanding that every public worker suspected of thievery, as well as those government officials who failed to prevent it, be held to account. What began with independent journalist Nick Shirley’s December 2025 investigation of Somali‑run daycare centers in Minnesota has mushroomed into reports of billion-dollar Medicaid scams in California and New York, corruption in the federal government’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, and schemes to provide phony addiction and autism treatments in multiple states.

President Donald Trump has already responded by forming a National Fraud Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice and appointing Vice President J.D. Vance to the newly created position of federal “antifraud czar.” Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is also releasing previously unpublished data on provider claims to Medicaid, so that both the public and the press can more easily identify suspicious billing practices.

But if the goal of such efforts is not just to punish those who have already committed welfare fraud but to prevent similar crime from occurring in the future, the psychological aspects of working either in or for a contemporary American welfare program should not be overlooked. For as management experts have long argued, any employer that requires its staffers to perform a service they privately know to be largely inconsequential is effectively legitimating dishonest behavior. And as studies such as the Russell Sage Foundation’s “Administrative Burden” have documented, few organizations so relentlessly groom this moral weakness in their own workforce as the modern welfare agency.

To understand why this is so true, one must appreciate the fact that more than half........

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