JUNK SCIENCE SHOCK: Study Says Half of Welfare Policy Research False As Fraud Crisis Explodes Nationwide

Everything the Democrats say and do is a lie.

“It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false….”

To Cut Welfare Fraud, Target Government-Funded Academic Fraud

More than half of all the research that has ever been used to design America’s social safety net is likely untrue, a study found.

By: Leslie M. Andrews, The Federalist, March 27, 2026:

n 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 Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is also releasing previously unpublished data on provider claims to Medicaid, so that both the public and the press can more easily identify suspicious billing practices.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.I

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