One of the advantages of having old systems is that they are so antiquated that almost nobody knows how to hack them. As far as "months" goes, it will take months. Maybe 96, at the minimum.

> We are so screwed. I honestly don't know what the end game will look like, but things are about to get very bad for many people in the US.

Reportedly, the SSA hasn't missed a benefits payment in 90 years, I'm betting that's probably going to change ...

[1]Social Security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten 'interruption of benefits,' ex-agency head says [cnbc.com]

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says his 94-year-old mother-in-law ‘wouldn’t complain’ if Social Security missed a payment, but he's literally s billionaire and she lives with him and his family -- so, ya, she'd probably be okay. Other people who rely on their monthly SSI check for rent and food, probably not so much.

[2]Howard Lutnick says his 94-year-old mother-in-law ‘wouldn’t complain’ if Social Security missed a payment — claims ‘real America’ will be rewarded while the fraudsters ‘yell and scream’ [moneywise.com]

(So much empathy, understanding and compassion from those in charge now... /s)

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/01/doge-actions-may-cause-social-security-benefit-interruption-ex-agency-head.html

[2] https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/howard-lutnick-says-his-94-year-old-mother-in-law-wouldnt-complain-if-social-security-missed-a-payment-claims-real-america-will-be-rewarded-fraudsters-yell-and-scream

Indeed. My sympathies are limited to anybody that did not vote for this delusional crap though.

I mean, 60 million LoC and "months" to rewrite? I would estimate you need 10...100 years to even come up with a sufficiently complete and correct spec for that rewrite. And then some more time to do that rewrite and get it to work.

There are good reasons why basically no complex codebase gets rewritten: It is essentially impossible to do for the human race. Maybe in 100-200 years, when we have made software creation a proper engineering discipline.

You guys literally elected Biff from Back To The Future, and his sidekick Ritchie Rich born in an apartheid diamond mine. Bring the popcorn.

There's really only two options:

1. They want cover while they loot the system. "Our new system revealed there's hundreds of billions of dollars missing" and all the tracks of them stealing it are gone.

2. Elon is a complete and utter moron. Given hyperloop, those tesla semi trucks, etc, etc that's certainly likely.

Of course they are. The whole "250 year olds are getting social security!" thing was showing how ignorant of the whole thing they are.

Everyone is celebrating the "waste" and "fraud" they find, but a lot of these things have delayed effects that we won't see for months.

Things like USAID being disbanded is going to hurt a LOT of farmers because they were a big customer buying lots of surplus food to give away. That stuff won't happen until the fall harvest and suddenly farmers will go bankrupt.

They're panicki

> They certainly know IT and know you can't rewrite a project of this scale in months. But will they be able to admit it's a bad idea? Of course not. They're too deep in the dogma.

Indeed. They are incapable of admitting their heros are really lying, scamming cretins and hence they start to hallucinate from all that cognitive dissonance.

I'll be watching for the inevitable references to Hunter Biden. Because somehow he always gets dragged into it. Always.

>> ... track the byzantine regulations ...

> What will really happen: The code will be simplified, the regulations ignored, so the SSA's new AI bot can decide who is 'Trumpy' enough to deserve a Social Security cheque.

That's fucking terrifying -- and, sadly, probably spot-on.

People with (continuing) Trump donations in their IRS files will get preferential treatment ...

Yeah, I'm surprised that the 20 somethings on the DOGE team aren't telling them to rewrite in RUST. Isn't that the new programming language hotness right now?

> So move from one antiquated, abandoned language to another?

As it turns out, moving from COBOL to Java is a common approach in the financial software world. While they are clearly different languages, Java, early in its life, implemented a BigDecimal class to precisely implement decimal arithmetic, which is critical in financial calculations.

Let's not forget the number of things that SSA deals with that are governed by state law (are these two people legally married?, is this person disabled?) to just add complexity to the mix. It's the sort of thing a junior developer with no experience would think they could do in months.

My father retired from SSA after nearly 40 years there, so I picked up enough over the years to understand that one might readily spend that long just understanding how complex a problem they were about to tackle.

I did meet someone who took care of that COBOL code in the late 80s/early 90s. They were about to start Y2K remediation. I did not hear of that anywhere else for oh, 8 years or so. So the folks taking care of it clearly took pride in their work.

They have zero chance of even understanding what you just explained, nor do they care.

What's more interesting is what the end game might be. We know the long term goal is the destruction of social security, destroying the database doesn't seem like a good path toward that end.

TBH, I do. I hope they do exactly everything they've been promising.

The answer has already been posted, it seems: xAI will do the recoding. [1]https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/03/28/2156237/xai-acquires-x

Please do hold your breath until that happens.

Calculating pay-in amounts is already by far the easiest part. Come back to me when your QuicBasic program can handle individual complex multivariable insurance benefit calculations for each of 71 million payees on a monthly basis without any hiccups. Because that's the problem we are dealing with, and it has precious little to do with whether the funds for the program are collected under a flat or progressive tax regime.

> ...they will not eat the cost of any mess-ups and the US government will.

Uh, no.

Musk will. Personally.

Musk is not a government employee, DOGE (Department of Graft and Extortion) is not a Congressionally created or authorized department and, as such, the government is not on the hook for it. Because they have chosen to operate outside duly conferred Congressional and Federal authority -- not to mention knowing full well that everything they're doing violates hundreds of laws -- Musk and everyone workin

If you're currently receiving social security payments I'm going to be laughing in six months when they stop.

Spotted the idiot that has never learned that complete rewrites of incredibly complex logic almost always fails after taking inordinate time and expense to come up with something worse.

There's a reason why the existing system is still the existing system.

What you actually are is called "delusional" or in modern terms "delulu". In that timeframe, it is not even possible to produce anything that works for a task of this complexity. Hence whatever will be produced will in fact be much worse.

> Whatever Elon's crew does can't be any worse than the shit cranked out by the usual government contractor bloodsuckers. Also, over sixty million lines of code in the current system? Wtf, do they just write a new line of code for every retiree???

The SSA payment system is incredibly reliable and reportedly hasn't missed a benefits payment in its 90 years (Google it). Also, (a) COBOL is a very verbose programming language and (b) there are a myriad of laws, rules and regulations governing SSI payments that have to be handled and that's the fault of Congress not the SSA.

From a practical point, Elon hasn't demonstrated that he and/or his DOGE crew have any understanding of what people do or how things work in any part of the government, and no indication that they're interested in learning - and they're just slashing things willy-nilly at the moment, not trying to re-implement / re-engineer anything. They are most certainly going to fuck this up, probably hard, if it even ever actually gets attempted.

> Whatever Elon's crew does can't be any worse than the shit cranked out by the usual government contractor bloodsuckers.

I have yet to see anything that could be called "competence" from Elon and his DOGE posse. Bring on the government contractors please.

> Also, over sixty million lines of code in the current system? Wtf, do they just write a new line of code for every retiree???

Have you ever seen a COBOL program?

It can only fail catastrophically. I mean, even rough estimations put this at > 1000 developper years and that essentially means these cretins will try to do it "with AI". Now, AI is not very good at writing code. Simple, small things, yes, usually. But anything complex? No. Hence they will very likely end up with somethign that does not even run abd cannot be fixed.

maybe. maybe people around here is just getting all worked up by the usual trash journalism ...

don't get me wrong, i don't underestimate these folks' potential to fuck up, but as far as i can tell this article is full of irrelevant anecdotes but cites exactly zero sources or details about the proposed migration, the core issue, and there are no other references to be found. just for that this content (and this source) can't possibly be taken seriously. except this is /. ofc, let the games begin!!!!

> "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.\nThe project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.\nUnder any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.\n“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED.\nThe Social Security Administration did not immediately reply to WIRED’s request for comment.\nSSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.\nThis proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.\nLike many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)\nAs recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.\nSSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.\n“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.\n\n\n\nGot a Tip?\n\n\n\n\nAre you a current or former government employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at makenakelly.32.\n\n\n\nIt’s unclear when exactly the code migration would start. A recent document circulated amongst SSA staff laying out the agency’s priorities through May does not mention it, instead naming other priorities like terminating “non-essential contracts” and adopting artificial intelligence to “augment” administrative and technical writing.\nEarlier this month, WIRED reported that at least 10 DOGE operatives were currently working within SSA, including a number of young and inexperienced engineers like Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran. At the time, sources told WIRED that the DOGE operatives would focus on how people identify themselves to access their benefits online.\nSources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project,” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries. The agency is currently battling for sweeping access to SSA’s systems in court to finish this work. (Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.)\nIn order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way, and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.\nDOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.\n“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”"

Also, don't forget that this is the "move fast and break things" crowd that would not understand the reason why they're using huge ass mainframes running real big-iron databases like DB2 instead of containerized node.js garbage.

They clearly have no understanding of the scale of the problem they're trying to solve. I don't even know if they could enumerate the problem beyond "green-field rewrite social security because somehow that's easier than learning COBOL for alleged software guys"

They aren't trying to produce a modernized system that does the same tasks just as well. They want to produce a buggy, broken version that denies people the benefits they earned.

Killing off a functioning system that many people rely on is best done in inches. If they migrate people over little by little, if the payments become unreliable rather than vanishing, fewer people take to the streets in any given month. And once people are contemptuous toward social security, it's easier to remove it via legislatio

Indeed, xAI will likely submit a $3 billion bid to do the job in months and bilk the country for 10s of billions in the long run "to get it right".

Back in the '90s when I was in college our BASIC programming instructor told us, "If you learn COBOL you'll never lack employment for the rest of your life."

Of course I ignored him, and went for RPG.

I was sure it meant "Single Sign All"

And then there are the few lines of innocuous-looking code preceded and followed by comments like

***DO NOT ALTER THIS CODE!***

I've seen this in production systems. No documentation, of course...