Technology

Over 70 million including many retirees, orphans, and disabled workers. The people most in need of help and the reason that trying to run a government like a capitalist business is one of the dumbest forms of government organization ever. A quick way to radicalize someone against you is to harm their family or take their money.

How many bugs? How will they secretly siphon money to their accounts? How much access will the Russians have? Who's gonna get discriminated against?

You mean Grok, right?

I think the hope is that it fails, they don’t want social security to work.

They are trying to break the government beyond all repair. At that point they'll say it's the Democrats that broke it.

Their cult members will swallow the lie hook line and sinker, and continue to keep them in power. (Side note, this will be made easier by gutting all election oversight as part of the package.)

Meanwhile, all that tax money we paid into Social Security, SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, Unemployment insurance... basically any program meant to help people, will flow directly into billionaire's pockets.

It's worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they're the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They're basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.

Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.

Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”

Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.

Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don't) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don't fully understand about it AND I've caused outages because of it.