One of the strange things that people don’t realize is that a lot of government software is ancient. It exists to service antiquated databases. There are programmers in their sixties and even seventies who make a good living dealing with technology that the average millennial has never even heard of.
While that problem isn’t fully unique to the government. Even the copy of Windows your computer may be running has plenty of ancient code in it to maintain backward compatibility, and some companies have ossified systems, but the situation is particularly absurd in the government. And while DOGE doesn’t get everything right, one area well within Musk’s expertise is technology. Social Security runs on COBOL. And by programming standards, COBOL is ancient. Updating that is necessary not only to cut costs, but to maintain functionality and have proper integration and access. The federal government is like some strange Dickensian library filled with incompatible standards and systems that have to maintained by a specialized techno caste.
And so the media is freaking out, not because it actually cares, but because it’s frantically pushing the REPUBLICANS ARE COMING FOR SOCIAL SECURITY button that is its last best hope.
Government codebases need to be compatible. We need to be able to integrate and maintain the various data sources. And ideally we should be able to do that before the last programmers who can do so die or more likely retire to a nice beach somewhere.
Moving Social Security off COBOL doesn’t threaten social security, it helps protect it.
