It's easy to check - pick the biggest program, Social Security. Look at Social Security outlay, say for 2019 (pick any year) [1] and you get $1,091,345M, number

It's easy to check - pick the biggest program, Social Security. Look at Social Security outlay, say for 2019 (pick any year) [1] and you get $1,091,345M, number of people getting benefits (71,322,000), and operating budget (13,083M). This means expenses to provide 1.091 trillion in assistance is 0.013 trillion, so the overhead is around 1%. In fact, they do all this for you, finding administration costs well under 1% [2] when all benefits and costs are accounted for. Pick any program you want, do the same. Medicare, SNAP, TANF, SNAP... go ahead and show me the excessive overhead to manage these programs. Have a citation to the contrary? [1] https://www.ssa.gov/budget/ https://www.ssa.gov/budget/ [2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html