Sooner or later, the party WILL be over.
Look at history. Everything eventually crumbles into dust.
My point is that continuing to fund EBT AFDC etc. may be the easiest thing for fedgov to do: just add fiat value to the cards. It’s the cheapest and easiest way there is ingratiate fedgov to the FSA population. If that system fails, it will probably be the very last thing to fail.
Now, as has been pointed out, these electronic payment systems are really a patchwork of federal and state computer networks that can and do fail.
A more likely scenario might be a cyber attack on the EBT systems designed to create this sort of social unrest.
Imagine a hack that doesn’t attach the EBT system directly, but that hijacks the payment terminal system. Imagine, for example, intercepting a legitimate transaction at the payment terminal, then breaking the payment request up into one cent increments sent sequentially to the government side processing system. Imagine doing that for all transactions processed at WalMart in a 10 minute period. That would look like a DDOS attack, but it would probably not trigger the system’s EBT fraud detection safeguards.