There's a sociology (yeah yeah I know the criticisms) podcast recently that pointed out this was actually a decision made through following economic frameworks

There's a sociology (yeah yeah I know the criticisms) podcast recently that pointed out this was actually a decision made through following economic frameworks of efficiency. Before this framework was in place, social good programs were actually run by social workers and similar people who had personal careers in the thing they were running. A lot of our golden age of government regulation and robust social programs and the like were when agencies were run by actual folks in that career, social programs run by social workers, environmental programs run by scientists... An example they used was the EPA during the ozone crisis. The EPA tried to set something like "we should set maximum allowable ozone to a level where 95% of americans wouldn't be affected" vs the economists at the time arguing they should look at the marginal cost of saving american lives and go for the efficient tradeoff between lives and economic production of more ozone.