That makes little sense. If it was a deliberate plan, it would be much more effective (and cheaper) to not provide the cellphones and data plan in the first place.

You see this all the time. Need to keep up appearances but the actually implementation is poor.

Exactly. It's easy to attribute malice where incompetence is the answer. The root problem is that there is no feedback loop so that the government agency funding the program isn't properly looking at the product being delivered at the other end and putting measures in place to stop the contractors from taking advantage of the program to only deliver the barest minimum without tracking the effects on the end customer.

It's not deliberate by the government. And the situation is getting better. Basically some of the telcos being a bit greedy and only giving 3GB/mo data to the users and spending all their profits on paying people in the hoods $20 a pop to sign people up.

Recently I've started to see some contracts with vastly more data, including some unlimiteds.