DOGE apparently wants to replace COBOL at the US Social Security Fund

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is currently experiencing great anxiety: As has now become known, IT systems that use the decades-old COBOL programming language used there are apparently to be migrated to a new solution within a few months. The SSA is something like the US Social Security Administration, which also administers pension payments to US citizens. Experts are predicting chaos, with some even fearing that millions of American senior citizens will not receive their pension payments.

The US magazine Wired first reported on the plans, citing anonymous sources from within the SSA. The agency itself would not comment on the matter. According to Wired, Steve Davis is responsible for the plans to abolish COBOL. The close confidant of tech billionaire Elon Musk worked for years in top positions in his company empire and still does, while also coordinating the work of DOGE.

Fears of hasty action

Incidentally, this also sums up the attitude with which Davis is approaching his plans for COBOL from the perspective of the SSA managers. COBOL is a hardware-independent language for business management developed in the 1950s. It is still widely used, and not just at the SSA. A large proportion of systems in the global banking sector, for example, still work with it. A migration of this scope and scale would be a huge undertaking for the SSA, experts told Wired magazine. According to them, the tight timeframe risks hindering payments to the more than 65 million people in the U.S. currently receiving Social Security benefits.

In 2017, the SSA had already started to migrate its systems out of COBOL, and the timeframe set at the time makes the dimensions clear: it was supposed to take five years, but the project was stopped in 2020 due to coronavirus. Now DOGE wants to try again and apparently rely on AI. According to Wired's sources, the bureaucratizers want to use it to translate the estimated 60 million lines of COBOL code into another programming language. It will also cover important core functions such as controlling pension payments. Should DOGE really be able to produce a new system in a short space of time, it would still have to be extensively tested. This is something that the interviewees also believe is hardly feasible within months.

Fear of data loss

The main risk is not that a payee would suddenly receive too much or too little social benefits in the new system. Rather, it is that they would not even appear in the new system and the SSA would no longer be able to track whether they were ever in the system before, explains one of the SSA employees.

According to Wired, ten DOGE employees are currently working with the SSA. It is not yet clear when a migration could start. Other projects currently have priority, such as the termination of "non-essential contracts" or the introduction of AI for certain paperwork. However, one of the SSA employees interviewed also believes that COBOL needs to be implemented as soon as possible: "Those responsible need to understand that they are dealing with a house of cards or a Jenga game, so to speak. If they start taking out parts, which they have already announced, then everything could collapse."

(nen)