Twenty-one state attorneys general just sued the federal government over food stamps. Not to feed more hungry American citizens. To keep benefits flowing to noncitizens and to stop Washington from checking whether the people collecting them are alive, unique, or even eligible in the first place.

I have spent three decades in investment management, much of it as an expert witness reconstructing where money actually went when someone claims it went somewhere else. That training teaches you one thing fast: when an institution fights harder to keep records sealed than to fix the underlying problem, the records are the problem.