The Trump Administration, with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Assistance (DOGE), is targeting a wide range of federal government agencies for mass layoffs — including the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA).
The SSA was established 90 years ago when Congress passed the Social Security Act of 1935 and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law as part of his New Deal. Social Security was one of FDR’s most important accomplishments, and the programs defenders — including former SSA Commissioner/ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley — are warning that SSA layoffs could lead to delayed Social Security benefits for millions of seniors.
The Trump Administration and DOGE, O’Malley warns, are laying off so many knowledgeable SSA employees that it will be difficult for the agency to function in the months ahead.
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While O’Malley is warning about the SSA not having enough workers to function properly, Wired reporter Makena Kelly is sounding the alarm about another DOGE-related SSA problem: a tech problem.
In an article published on March 28, Kelly reports, “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. The 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.”
Moving from COBOL to Java or another modern program isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself, according to techies interviewed by Wired. But it needs to be done gradually and cautiously.
For SSA, Kelly stresses, the problem is trying to make the change too quickly.
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“Under any circumstances,” Kelly explains, “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 U.S. currently receiving Social Security benefits…. As 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.”
An SSA tech specialist, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Wired, “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.”
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Read Wired’s full article at this link.
