Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems from the COBOL programming language to something more modern, according to a new report from Wired. And while it’s not yet clear what Musk’s band of dipshits plans to do exactly, Wired reports they aim to do it within “a few months,” a laughably audacious timeline for such a task.
Everything from the code that issues Social Security numbers to the payment schedules are written in COBOL, which was created in the 1950s, but the DOGE team seems to believe it can make a snap transition with the help of artificial intelligence, according to Wired. The DOGE team has already been reportedly running highly sensitive government data through AI, as the Washington Post reported last month, so why not use it to cheat-code your way to a more modern programming language? The reason, of course is the risk of cascading failures during any rush-job that might mean missed payments or beneficiary information getting wiped from the system entirely.
As Wired notes, the Social Security Administration had actually planned on migrating away from COBOL under a more realistic five-year timespan in the late 2010s, but that effort was derailed by the covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted countless plans in 2020. More than 65 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, and any hiccups would be devastating for people who rely on the program to stay alive.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently told the All-In podcast that if Social Security checks didn’t go out one month, his mother-in-law “wouldn’t call and complain.” Lutnick claimed, “a fraudster makes the loudest noise,” suggesting that only people who are fraudulently receiving Social Security would be concerned about payments stopping.
Lutnick’s logic doesn’t hold water, obviously. Millions of people who’ve paid into Social Security their entire lives have a perfectly reasonable expectation that they’ll receive the money they were promised. And Lutnick’s mother-in-law hypothetically would get help from her billionaire son-in-law if she didn’t get her check any given month. Most Americans who rely on Social Security don’t have a hyper-rich relative to bail them out.
The Social Security overhaul by DOGE is being led by Steve Davis, according to Wired, who is often described in news reports as the real day-to-day leader of the pseudo-agency. Davis joined SpaceX in 2003 and went on to become the head of Musk’s Boring Company in 2018 before being brought to Twitter in 2022 and then running Musk’s political action committee America PAC during the 2024 presidential election. Davis is seen as extremely loyal to Musk, with another top lieutenant of the Musk empire, Jared Birchall, quoted as saying “If Elon asked Steve to jump out of a window, he would do it,” according to the 2024 book Character Limit.
Wired’s report doesn’t name any of its sources within the Social Security Administration, but the news outlet has been reliably reporting on some of the DOGE team’s most galling cuts since Musk started taking a chainsaw to the federal government. Musk, who’s previously called Social Security a “ponzi scheme,” was given enormous power by President Donald Trump to unilaterally cut anything he wants, a nakedly illegal powergrab that continues to this day, despite several court challenges. Congress has yet to properly challenge Musk’s meddling with their power of the purse, but there are rumblings that some Republicans may finally be growing a spine. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, for example, signed on to a letter Thursday objecting to the Trump regime withholding $2.9 billion of funding allocated by Congress.
Musk and several people from DOGE were interviewed on Fox News by Bret Baier on Thursday night in a rather transparent attempt to calm fears over their ongoing destruction of the government. One of the DOGE staff, Joe Gebbia, talked about digitizing the records for retirement in the government, something that makes sense if done responsibly. But the DOGE team seems to think the reason government systems are so antiquated are that nobody ever thought of updating them before. The real reasons are two-fold. First, it takes large sums of money to migrate systems properly without disruption, which brings us to the second reason: Any disruption means millions of people could see critical services upended.
The Fox News interview was at times incoherent, as Musk promised that people getting Social Security would get more money after he was done rooting around in the systems.
“In fact, what we’re doing will help their benefits,” Musk said. “Legitimate people, as a result of the work of DOGE, will receive more Social Security, not less. I want to emphasize that. As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money.”
Musk even said he wanted people to “check back” on his claim in the future.
The claim that people would be getting more money from Social Security in the future simply makes no sense, and it’s hard to figure out why he’d bother saying such a thing. Only Congress can tinker with how much money would be paid out to beneficiaries. But Musk’s many lies have rarely had any real consequences.
IT expert Waldo Jaquith, who used to work for the U.S. government’s 18F department (which was recently abolished), wrote on Bluesky that Musk’s plans for Social Security computer systems were a really bad idea. “This is profoundly stupid and will definitely fail, and it’s just a question of whether our social security system fails along with it,” Jaquith wrote.
Jaquith went on to explain that there didn’t appear to be any real reason for this rushed push away from COBOL, especially if people are getting their Social Security payments reliably and on-time right now, as they have for decades.
“I cannot think of a single legitimate reason for DOGE to perform such a modernization, especially on such a time scale. A lot of my work is around helping agencies triage how to deal with old systems. If the old system works, *leave it alone*! Start with stuff that’s broken!” Jaquith continued.
Jaquith speculated that the real goal in migrating to a new system was to “create a technical chokepoint for the flow of money to allow individuals or groups to be punished extralegally,” saying that it’s all likely just “a fig leaf covering the real goal of fascism.”
Protesters are expected at more than 200 Tesla locations around the world on Saturday as a peaceful show of force against Musk’s illegal power grab. But not all of the protests against Musk have been peaceful. Federal authorities charged a 36-year-old man in Nevada just yesterday for allegedly setting fire to multiple Tesla vehicles at a Collision Center in Las Vegas. That man has been charged with both state and federal crimes, with no less than Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel weighing in to say that Tesla dealerships will be defended against “terrorism” by the federal government.
“As promised, acts of violence and vandalism will not be tolerated, and today law enforcement personnel acted quickly to arrest an individual on charges including arson,” Patel said in a statement Thursday. “Under Attorney General Bondi’s leadership, we will continue to pursue these investigations with the full force of law and will bring to justice anyone responsible for these attacks.”
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