You didn't make an argument. You just made an unsupported claim. You did not compare fraud rates, you did not measure costs or benefits, you did not account for the urgency of the established by the context or make any attempt to assess relative feasibility. You made no argument.
More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.
It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.
So is this an argument? You're not comparing any real data either, just making a hypothetical comparison. Can I do that too?
Imagine if every state issued their own digital ID that was part of a national federated system of PKE. That is, each state trusts the certificate authority in each other state, and the fed trusts the states. There's some mechanism to sign into a federal website and to transfer money to a bank account, or perhaps a mechanism involving showing up to a postal office, who knows. Compare this to dispersing funds quickly but without any verification of identity.
By doing the work up front to be able to quickly verify identities it means that the fraud prevention happens before the fact.
Do you think the $76 billion would have been better spent on digital infrastructure or written off as fraud? And what about the next time there's a need for helicopter money?
You know the DoD is fazing out CAC and there's a lot of very cheap tooling around PKE digital IDs...
