Elon Musk’s DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL

Young software engineers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continue to infiltrate U.S. government agencies with the stated goal of eliminating what the Trump White House deems wasteful (or “woke”) spending. They’re already on the ground at the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And they’re spreading further every day. 

DOGE has also said it aims to “modernize” government systems, which implies altering the code within those government systems. That could bring members of the organization face-to-face with something they’ve potentially never seen before: COBOL, or common business-oriented language.

COBOL was developed in the 1950s by a private-public partnership that included the Pentagon and IBM. The goal was to create a universal, English-like programming language for business applications. In the decades since, private-sector businesses have moved away from the language. The code is difficult and costly to maintain, and was built for batch processing, which means it doesn’t integrate well with more modern cloud-based and real-time applications.

But it’s a totally different story in Washington, D.C. Indeed, despite a number of modernization pushes in recent decades, the language is still widely used within government mainframe systems that manage all kinds of government financial transactions, from tax payments and refunds to Social Security benefits to Medicare reimbursements. 

The systems, if maintained correctly, are extremely reliable. COBOL acts as the “glue” that holds the components of the mainframe together, the code that orchestrates its work with apps and databases, as one expert told me. The mainframes themselves are loaded with redundancy and fault-tolerance features so they never break down. COBOL-based mainframe systems are also still widely used in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare. 

Some people worry that Musk’s young engineers might blunder into the COBOL code base and make changes without understanding the full effects. Normally, any changes to the code underlying government systems has to follow a set of detailed business requirements written by other agency staffers. Any delays or downtime in these systems has direct effects on real peoples’ lives. 

It’s also very possible that software engineers and others within the agencies will impress upon Musk and his DOGE advisers the importance of respecting established norms. But Musk and his people are, if anything, unpredictable. Should the DOGE staffers attempt to rewrite sections of the COBOL code, it could lead to unintended consequences, including major disruptions to critical government services. And unintended consequences are very possible, if not probable. 

“It’ll break and then we’ll figure out what to fix”

In a way, the COBOL language symbolizes the disconnect of worldviews of the players in the DOGE drama. Maintaining the COBOL code is a process of translating new policies or regulations into detailed business requirements, translating the requirements into computer code, arduously testing the code in a safe environment, putting the final product into production, and documenting its purpose in the system. Since COBOL hasn’t been part of the computer science curriculum since the 1990s, the people who do this work are usually older, and their numbers are diminishing. 

Musk and the DOGE staff, most of whom are young software engineers from Silicon Valley circles, are used to a very different “move fast and break things” process, says Don Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, which helps governments modernize complex services and products. “You look at the way, for example, the early Tesla full self-driving software was put together, and we have a culture in the tech industry of, ‘Let’s hack it together, let’s get something that works well enough, and then it’ll break and then we’ll figure out what to fix,’” says Hon, who has helped troubleshoot and modernize state and federal government systems, including Medicaid and logistics at the Defense Department.

To be sure, that philosophy has yielded a lot of success for entrepreneurs like Musk in the past, Hon says. But that sort of calculated risk means something very different for government systems on which hundreds of millions of people rely. Engineers who’ve spent their entire professional life developing consumer-facing software may not be equipped to draw a correct risk profile for implementing changes to a government payments system. 

“You’ve got someone who might say, ‘What’s one missed Social Security payment or what’s one missed Medicaid payment, because we can fix it later, right?’” Hon says. “What’s one missed federal payment that the states then disperse weekly to, for example, a service provider for social services?” (DOGE did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

The COBOL software is brittle. If, for instance, the code is updated with a new policy that conflicts with an existing one, the whole system can crash. Some systems don’t have automated testing routines, so software engineers must program tests by hand and go through the time-consuming task of testing new code before it gets implemented. This is complicated by the fact that some parts of the code aren’t properly documented, so people who’ve not yet seen it—such as DOGE engineers—may not know what the code was written to do. 

Without whistleblowers from inside the agency, it may be hard to know if the DOGE people are attempting to alter system code. Earlier this month the Trump administration and the Treasury Department claimed that Musk and his cadre of DOGE operatives have merely “read only” access to government computer systems—and will make no changes to government systems or operations without the express consent of the president. But in a recent court filing, the highest-ranking DOGE point person at the Treasury Department, Thomas Krause, admitted that another DOGE staffer at the department, Marko Elez, had indeed been granted “read and write” access to the code, allowing him to alter it. (Krause said this access was given by accident.)

Krause also said in the same court filing that his job is to understand how the agency’s “end-to-end payment systems and financial report tools work, [and] recommend ways to update and modernize those systems.” This implies an intent to alter system code. Such an effort could easily touch the COBOL code working within the mainframe systems.

In the court filing, Krause said he’s been working closely with Treasury staffers to find ways of advancing Trump’s and Musk’s objectives while still respecting the agency’s data privacy and security guidelines. But DOGE officials already pushed out the Treasury’s highest-ranking career staffer, David Lebryk, after he refused them access to the agency’s payment systems. Krause likely can dispatch any internal objector with one phone call if they don’t comply with DOGE’s wishes. 

But the DOGE team may think twice before firing the veteran staffers who speak COBOL and know where the bodies are buried. In the end, COBOL’s incomprehensibility and brittleness may be features, not bugs.

<hr class=“wp-block-separator is-style-wide”/> https://www.fastcompany.com/91278597/elon-musk-doge-cobol-language?partner=rss&amp;utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&amp;utm_content=rss