This is insane:
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.
I have made my career largely redoing systems, for a variety of reasons, and no one in those kinds of jobs would ever suggest redoing a system of this scale and age in six months. No one smart would suggest relying on code generated by imitative AI as a shortcut — that code always, always, always needs to be double checked for flaws, especially security flaws. It really doesn’t buy you much in terms of speed, even if it can help somewhat with boilerplate code generation. No, this is such a stupid idea that I suspect that it is largely an attempt at a backdoor cut to social security. It might not be, but I will walk you through the reasons this is a galactically stupid idea, and I think you’ll be left wondering the same thing I am: are they trying to make SSA perform worse on purpose?
There are basically four reasons you attempt a massive rewrite of an existing functional system: it is so buggy it needs to be rewritten; architectural changes to enable some business need; a lack of available talent on the code base that the system is currently written in; performance issues. Well, technically there are five: a VP or other high-ranking exec read an article or talked to a consultant and now want to be “modern”, but that’s never a good reason so we will ignore it for now. None of those reasons appear to apply here.
The Social Security Administration system, like a lot of government systems, is written in a language called COBOL. COBOL was largely created by Grace Hopper (and, frankly, if you told me that Elon wanted to ditch the system entirely because it has girl cooties, I would find that more believable than any of the other explanations) to be a language specifically good at processing data. I know (or knew — I haven’t written any since college. Yes, I am old. Get off my lawn while I write this FORTRAN program) a little bit of COBOL, and you can see that in even simple applications. As far as I can tell, based on everything I have ever read about COBOL systems, they are fast and stable. There is no world in which a Java based system — Java is a general language — is going to be faster than the COBOL system in place.
There also does not seem to be an architectural reason for redoing the code base. Sometimes you will have older systems that run well but because they are so large and cover so many functions that the pace of enhancements is too slow. Since they run 90% of what you are doing, every time you touch one area, you must test the whole thing and that is time consuming. Carefully moving to a more distributed architecture, while bringing problems of its own, can solve the business’s need for more rapid improvements in some areas. But, again, the SSA system does not seem to fall under that. The core system, the one written in COBOL, is apparently excellent at its job and a lot of the communication to Americans is already done by distributed systems.
Talent might be a concern — there are not a lot of COBOL programmers around. However, I am unaware of the SSA being unable to hire and train good programmers. Bluntly, the chaotic and incoherent random firing of people that DOGE indulges in is more likely to cause a talent issue than the language itself.
There also appears to be no general collapse of the system that would justify a complete emergency rewrite. There are no indications that the Social Security system is performing poorly or that it has issues ensuring that the data it runs on is processed correctly. In fact, older systems tend to be pretty bug-free. They have been poked and prodded and beat upon for years by the target audience, and they have been honed by that process. You are much more likely to introduce bugs or lose features by doing a rewrite. Older systems tend to have poor documentation, especially for bug fixes, reading code is harder than writing it, and small things can and will fall through the cracks. It is almost inevitable that you will miss some edge cases or bug fixes as you transition. If you are trying to transition quickly, that probability is somehow greater than 100%.
And that, I suspect, is the real reason they are moving so quickly. It is entirely possible that Musk is just such an arrogant know-nothing that he thinks anything can be solved by a “hardcore” mentality and a handful of incel programmers who will do what he says, damn the consequences. But I suspect that, at a minimum, they really do not care if they break the system. Because breaking the system means less money goes out of it, as mistakes are made, so there is more money for tax cuts for Musk. And there will be mistakes. Musk is convinced that fraud is rampant (it is not) and that there are millions of dead people getting benefits (there are not) because he knows literally nothing about the system he is supposedly lead the charge away from. The mistakes are going to be a feature for these people, not a bug. Even if money goes to people who do not qualify, that is a benefit — see the system is fraudulent and broken and aren’t we wonderful for showing you how! Now give old people and disabled kids’ money to me instead!
Musk and the GOP clearly want to cut social security for Americans. They know they cannot do so legislatively so this plan, like the plan to close offices and reduce phone service, is at least partially designed to achieve those ends. Once they have broken the system, they can pocket the money, via tax cuts, not going to the people who paid into it and deserve it and they can argue that the system is fraudulent and broken and the whole thing should be transferred to someone like Musk who knows how to run a high-tech business. Even if they are arrogant enough to think they can pull such a rapid transformation off seamlessly — and I stress to you that you have a better chance of seeing Jesus, Buddha and Mohamed playing on the first line of the Blackhawks than you have of seeing that — they don’t care if they fail. Failure means pain for people they despise and potential profits for themselves.
Failure means cutting Social Security benefits and they are essentially guaranteed to fail.
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