But many fathers feel mistreated themselves by the child support process, particularly its presumption that in most cases the children should stay with the mother. She's made false charges, but I might have to pay her legal fees. He also has a lament shared by many fathers, as well as some economists, that many states' child support guidelines dictate payments that are unnecessarily large, representing far more than just the marginal cost of the child to the mother's household, and in fact are more like alimony than pure child support. Despite all the money the federal government is spending and the state governments are making, the child support bureaucracy still isn't running efficiently even on its own terms. A recent GAO report goes on for dozens of pages about the child support bureaucracies' administrative problems, and the insistence that a larger, more intrusive bureaucracy is needed indicates that they aren't bringing the problem under control.
Government can almost never admit that some problems are simply intractable in a free society.
So long as they don't feel responsible, tinkering with changes in government programs won't make them so. But it would need to be an authoritarian state.