When they get out of jail, they have to pay for the amount of stay they had in jail. So, not a lot of taxpayer money wasted. By your logic, we should stop putting anyone in jail since oh no! That's wasting taxpayer money! Criminals deserve to be in jail. As a society, we agree to pay our taxes so we could make sure that these fucks can't ruin the society we live in. When countries make an example out of someone, they tend to ignore the cost since they want to make sure no one tries to do it again. The question you should be asking is, is federal govt capable of spending say a 100 million dollars or so if they really want to do something? They don't even have to process 200-300k people. Even if they choose randomly and just ruin the lives of 10-20k, that should scare the rest of forever. I really hope they try to ruin lives of the max number of fraudsters. It would be fun to see them in jail since they were so confident just a month ago that they have successfully gamed the system.