DOGE’s Reckless Push to Rewrite Social Security Code Could Break the System
REWRITE: *WILL* Break the System
In a high-stakes game of digital Jenga, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a Trump-era creation now helmed by Elon Musk loyalist Steve Davis—is attempting to overhaul the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) core systems by rewriting millions of lines of COBOL code in just a few months.
Experts are sounding alarms, warning that rushing the process could disrupt payments to more than 65 million Americans who depend on Social Security.
“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” said a former senior SSA technologist. “If they start pulling pieces out… things can break.”
DOGE's plan would migrate all SSA systems from COBOL—a programming language from the 1950s still deeply embedded in the agency’s infrastructure—to a modern language like Java.
The problem? A similar effort was proposed in 2017 with a five-year timeline and never fully materialized. The current proposal compresses that multi-year effort into months, potentially relying on generative AI to accelerate code translation.
Experts caution that even a single invisible error could mean a beneficiary doesn’t receive their check—“and not knowing about it,” as one SSA technologist put it, is the real danger.
DOGE insiders have already begun infiltrating the SSA, pushing a project dubbed “Are You Alive?” that bizarrely targets phantom beneficiaries allegedly aged 150—a figure Musk erroneously cited as proof of fraud.
The truth? It’s likely a COBOL quirk, not a scandal. The DOGE bros don’t know what they’re doing.
While SSA prioritizes terminating contracts and exploring AI for admin tasks, nowhere in internal documents is this code overhaul even mentioned. Yet DOGE seems dead set on blowing up legacy systems without a safety net—because nothing says “efficiency” like risking a national benefits collapse to win internet points.
Source: Wired