Elon Musk thinks he can modernize Social Security's 60-million-line COBOL codebase in just a few months. What could possibly go wrong? Only everything that keeps 73 million Americans' benefits flowing.
As reported in Computerworld, Musk's fake "Department of Government Efficiency" wants to convert the Social Security Administration's ancient payment system to Java. But they're ignoring decades of failed attempts and the system's mind-bending complexity. The IRS has been trying to update its own legacy code for decades with zero success.
The DOGE team's naiveté showed when they recently mistook a COBOL date formatting quirk for evidence of 150-year-old fraudsters stealing benefits. Even more concerning, they're tackling this massive project with just "nine kid software engineers" who likely can't read COBOL — a language taught in fewer than 25% of colleges a decade ago.
Former SSA deputy commissioner Jason Fichtner told CNBC the risks are enormous: "If you start messing with the system's code, that could impact those who are currently getting benefits now, and that's a new front-and-center concern."
Perhaps most telling is the assessment from Waldo Jaquith, former director of technology acquisition for the Inflation Reduction Act: "I'm an expert in modernizing legacy government software systems. This is profoundly stupid and will definitely fail, and it's just a question of whether our social security system fails along with it."
Previously:
• Why COBOL will never die
• States need programmers who know old COBOL language to process a surge in unemployement claims
• DOGE plans to rewrite Social Security codebase in months. Who cares if they fail?
