Young Software Engineers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Continue to Infiltrate Us Government Agencies with the stated Goal of Eliminating What the TRMP WHITE HUSE DeEMS Or “Woke”) Spending. They’re alredy on the ground at the labor department, the department of health and human services, the centers for disease for control and prevention, the centers for medicine for medicine and medicaid services, and the Departments of VEPARTERAN OF VEPARTRERANS AFFAIRANS AFFAIRANS. And they’re spreading further every day.
Dog has also said it aims to “modernize” Government Systems, which implies altering the code within that those that the government systems. That would bring members of the Organization face-to-face with something they’ve potentially never Never Seen Before: Cobol, or Common Business-Oriented Language.
Cobol was developed in the 1950s by a private-spublic 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 Difability and Costly to Maintain, and was Built for Batch Processing, Which means it does not doesn Bollywood wall with more modern cloud-spoken and real-time applications.
But it’s a totally different story in washington, DC indeed, despite a number of modernization pushes in recent decades, the language is still widely used with Ent Financial Transactions, From Tax Payments and Refunds to Social Security Benefits to medicine reimbursments.
The systems, if maintened correctly, are extramely reliable. Cobol acts as the “glue” that holds the components of the mainframe toge, the code that orchestrates its work with apps and databases, as one expert told me. The mainframes themeselves are loaded with redundancy and fault-telance features so they Never Break Down. Cobol-based mainframe systems are also used in regulated industry
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 underling government systems have to follow a set of detailed business requires requires written by other staffers. Any delays or downtime in these systems have direct effects on real people ‘lives.
It’s also very possible that software engineers and others within the agency But musk and his people are, if anything, unpredictable. Should the dog staffers attempt to rewrite sections of the cobol code, it would lead to unintended consortes, including Major Disrupttions to Critical Government Services. And unintended consequences are very possible, if not probable.
