To: firstresponder who wrote (67 ) 2/15/2025 1:25:51 PM From: firstresponder Respond to TL;DR: Our COBOL-based government payment systems are now at the mercy of Musk's young TechBros with (at best) limited understanding of what COBOL does. So, what happens if their intrusions break the payment systems for a few cycles, as long they get around to fixing them "later?" contract . I''ll be interested to see what he thinks about extending the current terms.article published yesterday.: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. unpredictable . 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.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. 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. “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.)"
