Even if people cheat the system, you’ll need multiple bureaucracies to implement the means testing, do audits, and do enforcement for people breaking the rules, then you need to involve the legal system. How much money could you possibly be saving at the end of that?

It may be hard to believe, but the cruelty is in fact the point. They would rather eg. pay $70k per year or whatever the fuck it costs to keep someone in jail for a year versus $15k per year to give someone enough welfare to barely scrape by.