It's accountability in the age before we had AIs that could spot strange patterns of behavior across millions of government employees. Presumably now there might be more efficient ways to do this, but it's a combination of inertia and fear of what the consequences would be if such a program didn't work out. The upside of the current system is that it leaves huge paper trails and everything is auditable; the downside is that actually auditing all this stuff is so painful.
It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.
That's an experimental YF-22A crashing due to a software glitch. That's a $300-400M hand-crafted state-of-the-art-on-a-hundred-dimensions supersonic jet, almost killing the test pilot (an engineer who flies planes) 50 feet off the ground at 150 mph. Just the cost of training that pilot is easily in the millions of dollars.
Everyone agrees the budget process is nuts, right up until something like that happens. And then everyone who ever signed any document related to that airplane is able to sleep at night. Except the software teams that wrote or approved the code. They're going to loose sleep, and they know why.
Oh, and the DoD is a rounding error compared to CMS. They have routine fraud complaints that would sink a major defense contractor.
I think fraud detection and holding people accountable for safety lapses are two completely different problems calling for different solutions. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail.
If we didn't spend so much money on fraud detection via immense bureaucracy, that would increase the amount of money available to provision services.
It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.