The core “logic” of SSA is also mainly written in COBOL. This is issuing a social insurance number, managing payments, and even figuring out the code the beneficiary should receive, the beneficiary should receive. Even small changes can lead to cross-plan failures.
“If you don’t have to worry about a group of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong rights, or having to wait for age, then be sure to keep moving forward,” said Dan Hon, head of Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consulting firm that is a government modernization service that completes such migrations in a short time.
It is not clear when the code migration will begin. The latest document circulated among SSA staff lists the agency’s priorities that may not be mentioned, but instead name other priorities, such as termination of “non-essential contracts” and adoption of artificial intelligence to “enhance” administrative and technical writing.
Earlier this month Wired reports at least 10 Doge operators Currently working in SSA, including many young and inexperienced engineers such as Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran. At the time, sources told Wired that Agent Mendog will focus on how people recognize themselves to get benefits online.
Sources in SSA expect that the project will start seriously once Doge determines and treats the beneficiary as deceased and connects different proxy databases. In court filing Thursday morning Affidavit SSA Agent Administrator Leland Dudek said from SSA Agent Administrator that at present there are at least two Doge operators working on a project called “The Project You Are Alive” targeting projects that these operators believe are by convening individual beneficiaries to improper payments and fraud within the agency system. The agency is currently vying for a thorough access to the SSA system in court to complete the work. (again, 150 years old No social security benefits were collected. That particular age may be COBOL’s quirk. It does not include date types, so dates are usually encoded as specific reference points – probably 20 October 1875, the date of the International Standards Conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention”.
To migrate all COBOL code to more modern languages within a few months, Doge may need to adopt some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate millions of lines of code, sources told Wired. “Doge thinks that if they can say they’ve gotten rid of all the COBOLs in a few months, then their way is the right way, and we’re all just terrible because we don’t break the shit,” said SSA technologist.
Doge also needs to develop and test to ensure that the output of the new system matches the previous one. SSA technologists added that in a few years it is difficult to solve all possible edge cases, let alone months.
“It’s an environment that is fixed with wire and tape,” the former senior SSA technologist said in the CIO’s office. “Leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with houses of cards or jenga. If they start pulling out pieces, they’ve said they’re doing it, things can break.”
