Depending on your state and district (insert many weasel words here) once the percentage of grade school kids getting free lunch exceeds X% where X is a ridiculously low number (something like 5%), it becomes systemically cheaper to give every kid at the school a free lunch rather than to go all "free lunch cop" on the kids. I kid you not.

So my kids attend a school where everyone who asks for it gets the standard free lunch because its the cheapest overall way to provide service.

It makes mathematical economic sense due to inefficiency. If you figure a meal is like $2 and 100 lunch per semester thats $200 max possible cost. Assuming you go hard core authoritarian bureaucracy you need to verify eligibility each semester, the most you can possibly save the taxpayer by starving a kid is $200. But the total cost of social worker might approach $20/hr (they aren't paid well..) and it takes ten hours to help parents fill out request paperwork, schedule a formal meeting with the parents to discuss eligibility, meet the pediatrician to verify the kids getting proper nutrition, file the paperwork with the state to get funding, then handle acceptance or rejection by either meeting the parents again or otherwise informing them plus or minus appeals process and then submit the approval and funding to the district. Meanwhile the social worker has a boss and a bosses boss etc and office space and travel expenses at 50 cents per mile. Then the school has to hire a cashier to make sure the kids walking away with trays of meatloaf are either paying cash or "on the list". And you can't just hire one person you need a district wide pool to handle sick days or a backup plan. And cash handling ain't cheap despite two dozen smartphone online payment startups claiming it is cheap. And you can't have someone handle cash without at least some minimal oversight so they need a boss. And when the district gets paperwork from the social worker showing the state approved funding, someone needs to distribute that data to the school and handle kids moving to other schools in and out of the district and feed back kids leaving the district to the state so they're not fraudulently claiming a benefit for a kid no longer attending school. And you need to account for every penny for the taxpayer so a kid out sick has to be debited from the state reimbursement account but don't forget kids with tummy aches or at off site class field trips. And all this paperwork and/or web forms aren't going to fill themselves out instantly LOL.

I bet it costs the taxpayer as a whole over $2000 per semester to authorize a kid to eat $200 worth of free lunches. And its complicated as all heck and a failure it utterly disastrous, do you have any idea what the total lifetime cost to society of a starving child is? It aint cheap. And thats before the parents get a lawyer paid a fraction of the benefit to sue for starving their precious snowflake because they're poor or minorities or whatever. And being a giant complicated system its incredibly brittle and prone to failure and accident. Some social worker says F this and quits and ten kids starve. Some cashier steals from the till and now how do you pay for next weeks food shipment if the money isn't there? Another kid got beat up for his lunch money and now the parents are suing the school for creating an unsafe environment.

Its a staggering hell of a lot cheaper to just dump X kids times $200 into the food svcs account per semester and announce "free hot lunches for all". You could spend a lot more trying to make sure only the "correct" people are helped, but why waste taxpayer dollars that way?

Another aspect that helps is frankly meatloaf sucks, so 80% or so of the kids who can afford it, prefer mom's homemade sandwich over the hot lunch anyway, so in practice your food expenses don't really increase much, just the (larger) back office expenses go to zero.

Another good example is it would be possible to contract out for private police and private fire protection, but the paper shuffle would be idiotically expensive to administer, so its cheaper just to give everyone in the city boundaries police and fire protection.

This is a true story BTW. My kids elementary school exceeded some low threshold "around" 5% a couple years ago and they no longer account for hot lunch. You want hot lunch you walk up and eat it no questions asked. Generally my wife packs them a lunch because the kids hate hot lunch and theres some medically diagnosed food allergy issues etc. Also I have "free" "basic income" style police and fire protection when in city boundaries. Someday medical will work the same way.