The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programing languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.
SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to the data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening.
Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency budget DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, the Washington Post reported this week.
Politico reported: Elon Musk and his staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency defended their work in an hour long interview on Fox News as they look to cut down the size of the federal government and eliminate “fraud and waste.”
In the wide-ranging interview Thursday, Musk and his staffers — a group that has been notably out of the public spotlight amid ongoing controversies from DOGE — laid out their vision for efficiency across government agencies, from the Interior Department to the Small Business Administration.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, Musk and his team at DOGE have cut down entire agencies and instituted mass layoffs and voluntary buy-outs. Musk said they’ve made progress, but there’s more to do.
Musk and his team tackled one of the great controversies they’ve faced in their mission to modernize the federal government: social security.
Democrats have slammed Musk for cutting jobs and creating instability within the Social Security Administration. The Social Security Administration website has crashed numerous times of the last few weeks, while the agency has been overwhelmed with phone calls and has plans to cut thousands of staffers.
RawStory reported: WIRED is reporting that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is launching a major effort to completely rebuild the codebase used by the Social Security Administration in a matter of mere months.
According to experts who spoke with Wired, the effort to migrate the SAA’s database from the COBOL programming language to a more modern language such as Java.
Experts who spoke with WIRED said that this kind of operation is fraught with peril and could trigger what the publication describes as a “system collapse” if not done with the utmost care.