This is true for many government or government-adjacent organizations, not just safety net ones. I've often thought that this is because the typical government

This is true for many government or government-adjacent organizations, not just safety net ones. I've often thought that this is because the typical government worker sucks at math and can't be relied upon to do more than a gross comparison between two numbers ("Bob makes more than $x, therefore Bob is ineligible" rather than "Bob makes $1.2*x, therefore Bob only gets 80% of the full amount"). Even the IRS does this, and they're the one government organization you'd expect to be competent at arithmetic. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brackets https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac... This might've been necessary triage at one time, but there's no excuse for it today. With decent software, the worker doesn't have to deal with "advanced math" like percentages -- just type Bob's income into a form and the calculation is done automatically.