Musk’s Folly: DOGE Modernize Social Security Software/Hardware In Months

DOGE’s new plan to overhaul the Social Security Administration is doomed to fail

Modernizing the SSA’s technical infrastructure is not a novel idea – and such modernizations have a poor track record.

April 1, 2025, 2:09 PM EDT

By Waldo Jaquith, former government technologist

Elon Musk has turned his attention to the Social Security Administration, the latest agency that his team of novice programmers has invaded for the apparent purpose of hobbling it. Wired magazine reported last week that the Department of Government Efficiency plans to replace the mainframes that power the agency’s mission and rebuild their functionality on new servers in a new programming language — with just a few months’ work.

Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong.

Assuming Wired’s reporting is accurate, we know that such an effort will surely fail. The track record of decades of modernizations of thousands of software systems, in both the private and public sectors, makes that clear. This isn’t even an interesting-yet-flawed idea. It’s a hackneyed, clichéd bad idea that could only sound compelling to novice software developers. It’s like cooking a Thanksgiving turkey in 20 minutes by putting it in a blast furnace, or choosing to get measles instead of getting vaccinated against it: it sounds most convincing to the layperson who asks the fewest questions.

Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong.

Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong. While COBOL’s origins date to 1959, it’s an actively maintained programming language, with an updated standard published by the International Standards Organization in 2023. The advanced age of actively maintained languages is evidence of their sustainability and quality. Many “modern” languages are quite old: C is 52 years old, Python is 34 years old, and even JavaScript will turn 30 this year. COBOL remains so widely used in our financial system that 95% of ATM transactions rely on it. There are 220 billion lines of COBOL in use today. Why? Mostly because it’s really good at processing large amounts of business data.

Critics also complain that mainframes are antiquated in an era of cloud computing. In fact, mainframes are still in wide use throughout the public and private sectors. They are not the room-sized reel-to-reel machines of the 1960s, but instead sleek, modern machines that would turn any developer’s head. They excel anywhere that it’s important to have lots of processing power, high redundancy and the ability to muscle through big batches of data processing—precisely what the SSA needs.

Modernizing the SSA’s technical infrastructure is not a novel idea. The agency has continuously modernized its systems since 1982, and published a new digital modernization strategy just last year. That’s because one-time modernizations, at best, succeed only for a brief time. Without ongoing modernization, the infrastructure quickly will become old again. Continuous modernization does not necessarily mean replacing COBOL or moving the whole system off mainframes. It means identifying and prioritizing the most urgent needs of the system’s users and building whatever technical infrastructure is necessary to make that happen. It is entirely possible that COBOL on mainframes is the correct infrastructure for many of the needs of the Social Security Administration.

The important thing about the existing SSA technical infrastructure is that it works! Those 70 million people get their $1.3 trillion in monthly payments, which allow them to pay their rent, buy food, afford medications and give birthday presents to their grandkids. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s mother may not worry about getting her check — likely because her son is a billionaire — but to many of those 70 million people, their monthly check is all that’s keeping them housed, clothed and fed.

What could be the legitimate purpose of this incredibly dangerous operation?

If Twitter accidentally goes down for a few hours, nothing terrible happens. But if just one person misses a Social Security payment, that could drop the person off a financial cliff. Replacing the SSA’s core infrastructure with an entirely new system all at once is performing a high-wire act without a net, only it’s not DOGE staffers who risk falling — it’s the Social Security beneficiaries who depend on that social safety net.

Complex systems theoretically reflect a complex set of documented rules — in this case, laws, regulations and policies — but, in practice, there are additional rules that are encoded only in the software, documented nowhere else. To the inexperienced software developer, it can seem self-evident that you can replace an old system with a new one by using the documented, but the experienced software developer knows that’s a trap.

Replacing COBOL is a special challenge, for a reason generally known only to experienced COBOL developers: math works differently in COBOL. It handles decimals unlike any other programming language, which is particularly important for large financial systems working at the scale of the SSA. What COBOL might calculate as 1,000.99, Java might calculate as 1,000.98. Neither number is wrong in a mathematical sense, but for an accounting and payment system designed around decades of COBOL-based math, the Java-based answer is functionally wrong. For a system making 840 million financial transactions annually, such a small difference in math can quickly spiral into a disaster.

Even if we imagine that there was a complete, successful replacement of the COBOL mainframes with a different programming language and different servers, it’s not at all clear that anybody would benefit. The existing systems get the job done. And the mainframes are just for the backend of the system that handles data storage, tracking and accounting. The front end — the parts of the system that the public sees — would be left untouched by such a modernization. If the existing backend functions fine, and the front end doesn’t require modernization, what could be the legitimate purpose of this incredibly dangerous operation?

There are two possible explanations: either the DOGE programmers are so inexperienced and cocksure that they think this can actually work, or this is a cover for doing serious damage to the Social Security system. As a nation, we cannot afford the risk that either of these explanations are right, or the even greater and more likely risk: that both explanations are right.

That the SSA’s systems are old is not evidence of them being problematic — on the contrary, it is evidence of their reliability and sustainability. There is no “one neat trick” that will make a complete overhaul possible in the span of a few months. Hard things are hard. DOGE’s effort is likely to fail and threatens to bring down Social Security along with it.

Waldo Jaquith was an Obama administration appointee in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a Biden administration appointee at the General Services Administration, and a special government employee at the Treasury Department.

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Mar 30, 2025 #trump #elonmusk #politics After Elon Musk called social security a “Ponzi scheme,” lawmakers like Rep. Dave Min are hearing about the cuts he has planned. He joins The Weekend to weigh in.

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DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse / WIRED

Makena Kelly. Politics Mar 28, 2025 10:07 AM

Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.

DOGE’s Ambitious Plan aims to migrate the Social Security Administration (SSA)’s systems off COBOL to a modern language like Java within a few months, risking significant disruptions.

🚨 System Integrity: The migration involves tens of millions of lines of COBOL code, crucial for managing payments to over 65 million beneficiaries. Experts warn that expedited timelines may lead to errors and omissions in payments.

🛠️ Historical Context: SSA’s systems have not seen substantial updates since the 1980s, with COBOL being widely adopted since the 1950s. Previous modernization efforts have faced delays, particularly during the pandemic.

⚖️ Current Challenges: Following cuts and scrutiny from the Trump administration, SSA has experienced frequent website crashes and long wait times, raising concerns about the feasibility of this rapid migration.

Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What’s Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more!

Oct 28, 2023

Dave explores the IBM z16 mainframe from design to assembly and testing. What’s inside a modern IBM z16 mainframe that makes it relevant today? For info on my book on ASD/Asperger’s, please check out: https://amzn.to/47ItFnR

0:00 Introduction 4:47 Inside the z16 7:03 Super Input Output 9:39 Factory Assembly 10:56 Accelerators 12:24 Test Lab 13:50 DIMM installation 14:42 Water Cooling 16:49 Why Mainframes? 18:20 Fiber 19:47 Conclusions

Errata: Around 5:30, the CPUs are LGA(Land Grid Array), not PGA At about 7:07 should be 200 cores, not 256. At 20:03, they now achieve eight nines of reliability for both z16 and its Linux-only counterpart, the IBM LinuxONE 4. In a LinuxONE config, max RAM is 48TB.

Federal Agency Functions
U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) The Department of Commerce (DOC) works with businesses, universities, communities, and the Nation’s workers to promote job creation, economic growth, sustainable development, and improved standards of living for Americans.
General Services Administration (GSA) The General Services Administration (GSA) manages federal property and provides contracting options for government agencies.
Social Security Administration (SSA) The Social Security Administration (SSA) has two main functions. One is to assign Social Security numbers. The other is to run the Social Security retirement, survivors, and disability insurance programs.
A third function is to run the Supplemental Security Income program, for people who are 65 or older, blind, or with a disability.
Department of the Treasury The Department of the Treasury manages federal finances by collecting taxes and paying bills and by managing currency, government accounts and public debt. The Department of the Treasury also enforces finance and tax laws.

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