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 Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is also releasing previously unpublished data on provider claims to Medicaid, so that both the public and the press can more easily identify suspicious billing practices.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.
Invalid Research
To understand why this is so true, one must appreciate the fact that more than half of all the research that has ever been used to design America’s social safety net is likely untrue — the implication of a now famous paper published in 2005 by Dr. John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center. After trying to duplicate the results of influential social science long considered “settled science,” he was astonished to discover that they could not be replicated — in other words, they were never valid.
Even to this day, as Ioannidis himself laments in a recent report to the Institute of Art and Ideas, the majority of published social science research is still not accurate enough to reliably achieve any practical purpose — certainly not useful enough to cure a drug addiction, reduce homelessness, decrease neighborhood crime, or combat domestic violence. The blog Retraction Watch, which exists to identify flawed scientific papers and encourage their retraction, now flags more questionable psychological and sociological findings than when it first went online in 2010.
Universities’ Agenda
Ironically, a way to provide the American welfare system with more effective therapies and procedures — and as a consequence, reduce its tendency to legitimate employee fraud — has long been known. All that has ever been needed is for the professors who conduct the underlying research to adopt tighter study controls. In other words, to have a high threshold for what they regard as a “statistically significant” finding, to pre-register their study protocols and report any mid-stream alterations, and to use large sample sizes.
But ever since the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, America’s colleges and universities have prioritized a very different agenda. As social critic Irving Kristol (1920-2009) was the first to recognize, the massive research funding that accompanied President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signature domestic program, while well intended, had the unforeseen effect of turning higher education from a seeker of truth into the chief advocate for what has come to be called “progressivism.” Namely, the belief that the best way to improve society is through large, bureaucratic programs based on government-financed studies.
What Kristol had come to see was that the sudden availability of federal research dollars was tempting far too many healthcare experts, psychologists, sociologists, and other academics to produce findings that validated the public sector’s desire to grow its responsibilities. And the more these researchers — what Kristol called the “new class” — complied, the more support they were likely to get. At the same time, fewer and fewer studies were being conducted on how to harness the social benefit of those things that had little to do with bigger government: character development, spiritual growth, family life, healthy habits, and civic associations.
All this is not to say that social scientists of the time intentionally slanted their experiments for personal gain — or that government officials encouraged them to do so. It was rather that the flexible and imprecise methodologies of social science, as compared to those of physics, allowed an academic’s self-interest to have subtle sway over his or her study results. Similar to the way an ancient priest might talk himself into believing in the goodness of a king who generously subsidizes his parish.
Incentives for Progressivism
Unfortunately, the incentive to join with government in the seemingly scientific enshrinement of a progressive political ideology meant that academia was not willing to tighten its research procedures enough to risk producing incompatible results — even as it was becoming clear that social scientists were producing far too many “discoveries” that no one could replicate.
Ever since Kristol’s time, college and university faculties have only strengthened their mutually profitable relationship with government, going as far as to make left-wing ideology a precondition for appointment to most campus teaching and administrative positions. This has not only created an intellectual atmosphere with little interest in testing the integrity of its own findings, but it has made it possible for those who knowingly doctor their research to absolve themselves with what Princeton physics professor William Happer calls a modern version of Plato’s noble lie. “Because my made-up findings will advance the progressive ideology that all my colleagues believe in,” they can tell themselves, “what harm could there be in my continuing to pretend they are accurate?”
If there is any prospect that American social science will finally get back to doing honest, useful — and when applied by welfare workers, morally uplifting — research, it can be seen in a growing reflection on the undue influence of economic incentives by academics themselves. For example, Musa al-Gharbi, a Daniel Bell Research Fellow at Heterodox Academy who also teaches at Stony Brook University, has argued that nearly every academic paper touching on “how society should be best arranged” has likely been subject to “prejudicial design” based on how the outcome would end up profiting the author.
It is also encouraging to see that groups such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni are helping members to see that the progressive ideology dominating U.S. campuses is not some benign cultural quirk but a corruption with serious moral and financial consequences for the entire society. ACTA reports and websites such as “What Will They Learn?” make the case that many of the problems with the country’s social services can be traced to the intellectual fraud taking place at its universities.
Journalists’ Training
One thing that would be especially helpful now would be for journalists to become better educated in the basics of research methodology, so that they can evaluate any new study on its merits and not just the author’s academic credentials. At present, only 19 percent of the country’s 369 college journalism programs have an elementary statistics requirement. And of those that do, none offers the course within the department, which means it is not designed to impact a graduate’s approach to reporting.
The sad reality is that fraud will continue to plague America’s welfare programs for as long as the services they provide are based on the academy’s deeply conflicted relationship with government and not on a more rigorous social science.
Dr. Andrews is former executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is “Living Spiritually in the Material World.”
