Doge Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months

As someone who used to work for a Mainframe software vendor I'm tired of COBOL being considered "legacy" and bad. I didn't do much COBOL programming, but IBM is still releasing new compilers and new versions of z/OS for the Mainframe. Just because a language is old doesn't mean it's useless and worth rewriting. Instead of having COBOL be the boogeyman explain what the issues are. Is the system stuck on old COBOL versions do to lack of funding for upgrades, incompetence when it comes to long term maintenance plans, technical issues that make it impossible to move forward with new COBOL versions and would require a rewrite, etc. Are we going to see stories like this in 20 years about some company thinking they should rewrite the Linux Kernel in some new language and throw away all the C code that's been running for decades?

I had lunch this week with some former coworkers.<p>When I&#x27;d started working with them it was on the 20 year old C++ engine that ran everything.<p>Even at that time there was large team &#x27;rewriting&#x27; it in Java. That team was dissolved about 2 years later.<p>During the course of my employment two more large teams were spun up to do a rewrite and then came crashing down after a year or two.<p>I hadn&#x27;t seen my coworkers for about 7 years. Naturally they were still working on the C++ code. Naturally they&#x27;d seen two more rewrite teams come and go while I&#x27;d been gone.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why I&#x27;m bringing this up......

It never fails to amaze me how little we learn from the past. I wish I knew if it was unique to software development or all industries suffer from this level of hubris.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;things-you-should-never-do-part-i&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;things-you-should-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Mythical_Man-Month" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Mythical_Man-Month</a>

They’ll fail. I worked on a successful rewrite of a 25 years old Perl codebase. We did it because we had a strong understanding of the business, of the existing codebase, and were not afraid to maintain both in parallel. It took us years to migrate most of it blocks by blocks (some parts are still in Perl and likely won’t ever be migrated for various reasons) because a rewrite is not just converting some code, it’s an opportunity to rethink the whole architecture and responsibilities.<p>Doing a rewrite is doable and might be suitable, but I guarantee no one there has any idea what they’re doing. They wouldn’t talk of &quot;months&quot; otherwise. 60 million lines is a 5-10 years rewrite, realistically.

&gt; ... the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.<p>People can tolerate injustice to others, but they won&#x27;t tolerate late checks. If DOGE follows through, I think it will break Republican support in a scale even larger than threatening Canada or sending people to El Salvadorean prison.<p>We&#x27;re certainly living in &quot;interesting&quot; times ...

obviously the entire thing is horrific, but the complete fucking malice of the senior people, starting at trump, who act is if nothing in the world is hard or complicated, and all they have to do is be loud massive cunts and things will work out their (personal, of course - none of them give a fuck about others or indeed &quot;America&quot;) way is just absolute poison that will destroy America.<p>in this particular case, we&#x27;ve actually already seen what happens - &quot;Xtreme Programming&quot; was birthed from the - failed - attempt to re-write the Chrysler payroll system in Smalltalk in the 1990s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...</a><p>edit: and that was run by Kent Beck, not the National Union of Racist CS Undergrads that Musk exclusively hires from

So head-smackingly stupid. But also exactly what you’d expect from a group of inexperienced young developers. What are the odds we&#x27;ll end up with an 85% AI generated NextJS-powered app that melts down the second it&#x27;s implemented?

I am a care taker for an elderly parent. This worries me some. What sort of things should I get together if we need to reapply or other documents would we need to show that she has been receiving SSA payments (for 40 years of work)?

Last year I had the privilege to learn about the IBM mainframe, and the mainframers converted me. It is one of the most advanced systems I have ever seen. IBM solved most cloud-issues 30 years ago, and the backwards compatibility is insane. Everyone is worried about &#x27;code from the eighties&#x27; still running, but this just proves that the system is reliable. And in this datacenter (that I was learning about) the mainframe did 80% of calculations while only using 8% of the datacenter&#x27;s power, because the machine is so terrifyingly efficient.<p>This is not just about converting COBOL code. This is about converting the JCL (batch processing) jobs to whatever cool real-time processing solution the new architecture is going to have, and about translating the security boundaries from RACF to new security controls. Using AI to &#x27;convert&#x27; it might prove difficult, because I don&#x27;t think we have the datasets to train an AI to do this properly.

Grok, make a node.js program to administer and oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to millions of retirees. VERY IMPORTANT: No fraud or DEI.

hahahaha<p>What can go wrong and with the inspection service all fired, who will check for backdoors<p>Again these people need to go, and as others said, save everything you have from SSA on paper and if you can PDFs.

&gt; 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.<p>I thought this was wishful thinking &#x2F; already deboonked?

Did Twitter ever talk about finishing the rewrite they talked about doing early on?

Their timescales are clearly extremely unrealistic, but I don&#x27;t understand the motivation for doing this at all.<p>&gt; “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<p>I&#x27;m struggling to believe that this is the real motivation. But what is it?<p>Speculation: they don&#x27;t know how to backdoor the legacy codebase&#x2F;platform so they first need to transform it into something they can more easily subvert?

Do 10x engineers stack? So if you have 10 10x engineers is that 100x or is it 100,000,000,000x?

Not really surprised, it&#x27;s the usual mistake of any novice engineer, thinking that rewriting a system they don&#x27;t like is going to solve all the issues they imagine.<p>With the teenagers involved in DOGE under Musk it&#x27;s just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. They just never had the experience to actually go through a complete rewrite of something that&#x27;s been alive for decades... And never bothered to read &quot;The Mythical Man-Month&quot; because of course they are ninja rockstars 100x developers, and lessons from history and experience don&#x27;t apply to them.<p>Really sad that their mess will do very real harm to lots of people who depend on this system working...

IBM has been working on transpiling COBOL to Java for ages now, but it&#x27;s not anywhere near perfect. I believe the USAF converted a million+ line COBOL codebase using it, but it still took a couple years.

What is it with that guy and unnecessary and inappropriate rewrites?

As somebody that has worked at the CDC and now works for the NIH, the thing that enrages me about all of this is the gov desperately needs more efficiency. With hiring, compliance, grants, etc. Its very telling that I have heard nothing about the rube goldberg usajobs application system from DOGE.<p>Instead, we are getting a stupid made-for-TV efficiency, where the leaders refuse to understand technical concepts as braindead simple as a reference date.

They will most certainly just have a LLM &quot;try&quot; to write it<p>Then put it live in alpha<p>Screw up millions of people<p>Everyone is a beta-tester with Musk, no matter how dangerous to the product<p>And didn&#x27;t just 21 out of 50 &quot;DOGE&quot; employees quit in protest?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;25&#x2F;nx-s1-5308095&#x2F;doge-staff-resignations-elon-musk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;25&#x2F;nx-s1-5308095&#x2F;doge-staff-resi...</a><p>Is he going to outsource this to India with data access?<p>Musk &quot;special hire&quot; status ends June 1st, good luck getting it done by then or maybe this is the excuse he wants to keep going in continued violation of law

Years are made of months.

COBOL &#x2F; ADA etc are very old languages but it doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re bad languages.<p>the only major &#x27;risk&#x27; I can think of about them is talent pipeline.<p>DOGE wants to rewrite in a few months using Java lol. If it was Ruby maybe like MAYBe.

Bloomberg&#x27;s <i>Odd Lots</i> podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing&#x2F;updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades which is reflected in the code&#x27;s logic.<p>See &quot;This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software&quot; (Jun 2023):<p>&gt; <i>There&#x27;s a lot of frustration about the government&#x27;s ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there&#x27;s another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;this-is-what-happens-when-governments-build-software&#x2F;id1056200096?i=1000616611521" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;this-is-what-happens-w...</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2023-06-12&#x2F;why-governments-struggle-to-build-software-and-computer-systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2023-06-12&#x2F;why-gover...</a><p>One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge.<p>Related, &quot;Why COBOL isn&#x27;t the problem&quot;:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41420217">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41420217</a><p>Copy-paste from:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43078946">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43078946</a>

Tell me you&#x27;re an inexperienced developer without telling me you&#x27;re an inexperienced developer.

Everything is easy when you don&#x27;t understand it.<p>What can an accounting system possibly do? Keep track of people, how much they&#x27;re eligible for, and when you paid them last. DONE.<p>&gt; SSA maintains more than 60 million lines of COBOL today, along with millions more lines of other legacy programming languages.<p>Months?! I hope they mean days. With ChatGPT and AWS, they&#x27;ll be rolling! All of those millions of lines of code are clearly doing nothing useful.

This plan is just another way, like firing workers, to break Social Security, something that the wealthy have wanted to do for decades.

I&#x27;ve seen too many people think this move will be a total disaster.<p>I think it&#x27;ll be a very bumpy ride but ultimately the team will succeed.<p>Besides &quot;liberal sabotage&quot; is a ready made retort for any mishaps along the way.

If they screw this up the litigation could be the largest of all time.

It&#x27;s surprising to me how willing some people are to do the equivalent of yelling &quot;I am stupid and have no idea what I&#x27;m doing,&quot; to a large public audience.<p>This is a reminder to all you Americans to create a Social Security account and print out your statement.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;WIsni" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;WIsni</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;UvOO7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;UvOO7</a>

It is the plan - no SSA cheques are cut and then they blame the &quot;system&quot; is offline.<p>Brilliant !!!!

hmmmm, does the SSA have a good automated test suite?<p>If so then maybe it&#x27;s ripe for conversion by LLM.

Now is a great time to download your payment history from SSA.gov

I&#x27;m smelling another hyperloop ...

The old &quot;The place is clean, why do I need cleaners&quot; line.<p>I mean, there is a chance that this might work. But I strongly doubt that it would. Given Musk&#x27;s history of re-writes and deadlines, I suspect that actually its not going to happen.<p>But on the flip side, if you don&#x27;t care about complying with the law or caring about users, its probably possible.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, the SSA needs some innovation, but innovation, not revolution.

Months is a long time when you could just have an LLM spin up the rewrite for you in weeks!<p>&#x2F;s

TIL US and A has SSA.<p>*had. Doge will make short work of it.

Completely rewriting a running system isn’t efficient