I vehemently disagree with the stance that "they don't care."
I've been on the other side of the partition before. Do people come to their government needing help with having fallen through the cracks? Absolutely, quite often. On the other hand, do scammers do the same thing? Yep, even more often. There are a myriad of reasons to be cautious with identity paperwork, especially in our "digital but not really because a lot of stuff is still shuffled around in paper form" era of underfunded, understaffed, overworked, and occasionally disinterested civil service.
"But, have a fucking heart and do what's right!" Damn straight, and every day I tried my best to do that. But here's the thing: in my position, in a county office that was a "jack of all trades" that handled many things from marriage licenses to vehicle registration to property records, we lived in perpetual fear of the local TV stations coming in to do some "sting" on how incompetent we all were. In the two years I worked there, three out of the four TV news departments sent "informants" in to try to catch us in some trap where we weren't following the laws and rules To The Exact Letter. (It didn't help that this was a relatively wealthy county sitting right next to one of the poorest, and minority-population-level, in the entire state.)
If you drew the unlucky straw and unwittingly wound up with one of these ringers and you didn't do everything exactly By The Book, usually because you tried to help by being maybe a little lenient on the exact list of documents needed to get a certified copy of some record, you could count on having your face-with-blurred-out-eyes plastered all over ad spots for the next week. "Is the [county] County Clerk office putting YOUR CHILDREN at risk for IDENTITY THEFT?! Are the government employees at the downtown office UNTRAINED or MALICIOUS? Find out, when KZZZ NEWS AT TEN goes UNDERCOVER to expose WASTE AND FRAUD in our county government. EXCLUSIVELY, TONIGHT."
So, yeah, I see the rock and the hard place that people of all stripes are in.
I needed a birth certificate a few years ago and the expedient option was to have my mom (who still lives in my hometown) request one.
Through the whole thing, I couldn't help but think how Kafkaesque this process is, and what happens to people who don't have responsible parents who still have their birth certificates, or who can loan them money to pay the necessary fees, or who can't afford to pay extra to cut in the line? (And, frankly, what happens to people who aren't blessed with the level of cognitive functioning most of us take for granted, and can't figure out the dense procedures for replacing their ID?) There is nobody in government who is actually out there thinking of whether there is a path through this system for the most vulnerable people; the people who have lost everything. They don't care.