New York City’s 1976 administrative controls halved welfare acceptance and cut 18,000 cases monthly

Evidence

In 1976 New York City introduced administrative controls that were credited with reducing the acceptance rate for new welfare applicants by half and terminating 18,000 cases a month. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 768

Categorization

• SHARE: Hard numbers for someone working on welfare administration or municipal policy history — a genuinely specific datapoint.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the sacrifice-adjacent theme of administrative cruelty as policy rather than accident.