Editor’s note: The following letter's author sent it to Florida Congressman Aaron Bean.
DOGE and Social Security
As background, I spent over 42 years in the field of Information Technology. Many of those years were in writing, updating, and maintaining COBOL programs. In fact, I was the manager in charge of remediating the mid-tier programming code to accommodate the Y2K issues of 25 years ago at CSX. That problem dealt exclusively with how programs and/or applications handled date routines.
The issue at hand was that in the early days of programming the storage of data was extremely expensive, as a result, the MM/DD/YY was only allocated six physical positions. Meaning that only the last two digits of a year were recorded. The question then became how “does a program distinguish a year such as 1902 from 2002.”
We had a known problem, and we knew what the end solution was to be. However, that simply task involved 100’s of people, and four years to plan, test and implement back into a production environment.
As information COBOL is the program language used in our Social Security systems. I believe there to be hundreds of millions of lines of code, and numerous backend databases that feed into this system. It appears that DOGE is going to rewrite the entire Social Security system and modernize using newer programming languages and newer hardware platforms, thus replacing the older mainframe system with servers. I also contend they will use AI to accomplish this task. A process that does not exist in its entirety and will need months if not years to perfect.
We’re hearing that this transformation is going to be accomplished in a four-month time frame. It has been stated that the DOGE team has no COBOL programming expertise. Which I believe to be true, Colleges and Universities (of which I was an adjunct instructor for six years) stopped teaching the language last century.
I am here to caution you and the other elected officials that if you allow the DOGE team to go down this path, without a formal plan, to test, and retest and retest before they implement, tens of millions of people, such as myself will have our Social Security benefits interrupted for months on end.
Howard Lutnick, our Commerce Secretary, stated “that my 94-year-old mother-in-law would not complain about a missed Social Security check and that someone who would is a "fraudster." Be forewarned, the DOGE team can and will have unintended consequences when there is a disruption of Social Security payments, and we will see civil revolts never seen before in this country. As my elected representative to Congress, I expect you to act in the best favor of your constituents and this nation.
John Arnett
Orange Park
