I wish that were true. When I was a career counselor at the unemployment office, Income Maintenance Workers (usually known as “social workers” to the welfare recipients) had a quota and had to recruit people into their programs any way they could. That was during the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations.
Were you a federal or a state employee? As a "career counselor," wasn't your job to get people off these people into the workforce and off Food Stamps, etc.?
As for the "Income Maintenance Workers," did their pay increase with the number of enrollees into Food Stamps? Did that perverse incentive cause them to be lax in applying the standards to qualify for the Food Stamps?
According to Mark Levin on his radio show, at least part of the explosion of Food Stamps recipients under the Obama Administration has been due a more proactive promotion of the program and federal employees whose incomes depend on the number of new people they enroll. That system provides an incentive opposite to a salesman's commission in the private sector: the more they cost their (federal government) employer, the more income they earn.